Thoughts on Intellectual Property, Scarcity, Labor-ownership, Metaphors, and Lockean Homesteading
The following edited comments are excerpted from a recent email discussion with Walter Block and one of his correspondents, a Philosophy Professor
Other Schools of Thought
Displaying 1861 - 1870 of 2189
The Myth of Functional Finance: Mises vs. Lerner
D.W. MacKenzie recounts the sad saga of naive economists who believed that they could use fiscal policy to counter the business cycle.
The Libertarian Heritage: The American Revolution and Classical Liberalism
The libertarian creed, writes Murray Rothbard, emerged from the "classical liberal" movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Western world.
Where Would General Motors Be Without the United Automobile Workers Union?
Writes George Reisman: What the UAW has done, on the foundation of coercive, interventionist labor legislation, is bring a once-great company to its knees.
Society in Jail
Writes Jeffrey Tucker: even that law which appears to be a mere guideline and a help--such as a stop sign--must ultimately be enforced by jails and violence.
Against Polanyi-centrism: Hayek and the Re-emergence of “Spontaneous Order”
F.A. Hayek is known for making a number of important contributions to economics and social thought. If one had to identify a single concept that captures the thrust of Hayek’s intellectual project it would be “spontaneous order.”
2. The Emergence of Communism
The roots of Marxism were in messianic communism. Marx’s devotion to communism was his crucial point. Violent, worldwide revolution, in Marx’s version made by the oppressed proletariat, would be the instrument of the advent of his millennium, communism.
5. Mises and Austrian Economics
The essence of Austrian economics is based on the analysis of individual action. In other words, it is about individuals doing things, having purposes and goals and pursuing them. Other schools of economics deal with aggregates, groups, classes, wholes of one sort or another, without focusing on the individual first and building up from there.
3. The Pre-Austrians
Richard Cantillon was quite Misesian before Mises. He wrote of utility theory and the entrepreneur’s uncertainty in the 1970s. Cantillon was a great money practitioner. He became a bank and banker to the Jacobite Stuart line and to John Law who launched paper money inflation.
6. Hayek and His Lamentable Contemporaries
The Nobel award to F.A. Hayek in 1974 went directly against the tradition of that prize to go only to mathematical forecasters, left-liberals, and government central planners. Not only was Hayek’s work pioneering, but it is also the only correct analysis of business cycles past, present and future since they began in the mid-18th century.
