A reminder of this prescient remark from Mises’ Liberalism — a book published in 1927: “Fascism can triumph today because universal indignation at infamies committed by the socialist and communists has obtained for it the sympathies of wide circles. But when the fresh impression of the crimes of the Bolsheviks has paled, the socialist program […]
The recurring socialism/fascism cycle — Mises observation Read More »
Reprising this chart which integrates the major answers to the question: What makes liberal capitalism good? The chart diagrams the positive claims about liberal capitalism by its defenders — John Locke, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and others. For elaboration, see my book Liberalism Pro and
Justifying liberal capitalism — flowchart Read More »
Review of Leonidas Zelmanovitz,The Ontology and Function of Money: The Philosophical Fundamentals of Monetary Institutions Lexington Books, 2015, 447 pp.Reviewed by Stephen HicksFirst published at Law and Liberty, edited by Richard Reinsch and Lauren Weiner. Money is funny, the old saying goes, both in the cognitive puzzles it generates and the motivational extremes of human
Review of Zelmanovitz on the philosophy of money Read More »
In this unit of our self-paced course on Socialism, we start with a 7-point summary of Ludwig von Mises’s classic Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, focusing on socialism’s economic inconsistencies. Mises compares the principles of Socialism and Liberal-Capitalism and finds they differ not in their aims, but in their understanding of justice and the
Mises, *Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis* [Atlas Intellectuals] Read More »
Three attempts to sort out the new-style socialisms of this generation: * Nathan Pinkowski’s “The Strange Rise of Bourgeois Bolshevism” (May 2020): “The task American socialists have set themselves is to achieve and sustain a culture of free self-creation. But this culture, the culture of individual autonomy, grows out of the bourgeois.” * My “Young
The New Socialisms Read More »
For use in my courses, additions to my Texts in Philosophy page. All files are PDFs. William Bennett and Milton Friedman, Open Letters on the War on Drugs, from The Wall Street Journal (1989). Nathaniel Branden, “Self-Esteem in the Information Age” (1997). Max Forrester Eastman (1883-1969), excerpt from Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955).
Texts in Philosophy — very early 2017 additions Read More »
[Last week I posted five quotations from Ludwig von Mises indicating his opposition to anarchism. Several commentators mentioned the Mises Institute’s drift toward anarchism. That reminded me of some personal history.] I arrived at Rockford University as a newly-minted Ph.D. in the early 1990s. In addition to the normal excitement of becoming an Assistant Professor
How Not to Donate Money in Honor of Your Intellectual Hero Read More »
[I’m re-posting this good discussion from 2012 at Cato Unbound.] An instructive trio of essays by economists at Cato Unbound about Austrian economics’ reputation — especially Mises’s praxeological version — for being strongly a priori rationalist: Is Austrian economics anti-empiricist? Steve Horwitz says no. Bryan Caplan says yes. George Selgin also says yes. To Selgin’s
Is Austrian economics anti-empirical? (Horwitz, Caplan, Selgin, and Boettke) Read More »