Other Schools of Thought

By the 12th century, the Italian city-states had evolved a new form of government, new at least since ancient Greece.

"There is no point in making plans unless causal determinism is true; yet, if causal determinism is true, the very basis of central planning is destroyed, because the government planner is himself determined. By a strange lapse of logic, the believer in causal determinism always excludes himself from the system which he is putting into effect."

Prosperity meant the standing temptation of wealth to loot, and so the German emperors, beginning with Frederick Barbarossa in 1154, began a two-centuries-long series of attempts to conquer the northern Italian cities.

Every state needs justification. And the justifiers are always welcomed and cheered by the state. So we should not be shocked that a false science — a science that props up the state — is embraced by the state and associated sycophants.

"Governmentalizing, and thereby controlling through an appropriate bureaucratic apparatus, the providing of medical, accident, and old age care and of death (burial) benefits seemed an obvious way to put the reins on laissez-faire capitalism as well as on labor."

Socrates' conversation illustrates the logic of the politics of plunder and injustice in the polis. Socrates is able to do this because of his audience's lack of a definition of justice.

In the Free Market Environmentalism (FME) this can be justified on homesteading grounds: our ancestors exhaled, and left those rights to us.

"The kind of power traditionally exercised by kings and princes, represented chiefly by the tax collector and the military, was in fact a very weak kind of power compared with what a philosophy of government resting on the general will could bring about."

Then you may boast that you are the only school in the nation that offers any formal study of such economics based in deduction.

Although he writes with confidence, David Frum's rejection of the gold standard is based on faulty history, bad economics, and a belief in the power of Washington to manage the economy.