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 »
The one-hour video of my lecture is at the Atlas Society site and at YouTube. The lecture starts at 3:40, after the introduction, and is about 45 minutes long, followed by a question-and-answer session. The sub-topics are: * 13 initial arguments for liberal capitalism. * Some quotations from Mises, Schumpeter, Jouvenel, Smith, Hayek, Mill, Rand,
What makes liberal capitalism good? Here is a flowchart I’ve developed for use in some upcoming talks. 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. Click on the image for full size
Justifying liberal capitalism Read More »
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 series of quotations from Mises, I’d add this one from
Are Austrian economists anti-empirical? Read More »
A question for those who know the great Ludwig von Mises’s work better than I. Are the following two statements, both from Liberalism, consistent with each other? “I am not an ‘enemy of the state’ any more than I can be called an enemy of sulphuric acid because I am of the opinion that, useful
Mises on the state — a consistency question Read More »
Part of a work-in-progress in philosophy of economics, here is the video of a seminar I led on “Economics as a Value Science.” Part of my argument is that there is a large, problematic gap in economic theory about the relationship between economic facts and economic values. Along the way I discuss Friedrich Hayek, David
Seminar on “Economics as a Value Science” Read More »