Philosophy and Methodology

Above all, central planning allows a few who are the new elite to seek to control the total lives of the masses. It is this gigantic object lesson which brings the intellectual issues into focus.

Men do well under a plan and its controls if the Gestalt to be accomplished makes sense, is not too distant, and offers rewards as well as challenges for different levels of skill. But this is quite different from a superimposed, infallible political philosophy which would urge on us an engineered society.

We've all encountered the rival theories Hunt is talking about here — the thinkers like Max Weber, who believed that the rise of liberalism was caused by the Puritan work ethic, the thinkers who believe that the rise of liberalism was made inevitable by Christian ideas about the individual soul, and so forth.When you're attempting to explain market processes, whether in the marketplace for goods and services or the marketplace of ideas, it's never that simple.

Economics is about human choice and action. The praxeological concept of time is not the concept of physics or biology.

In the long run, the religious "peace" of absolutist "moderation" turned out to be the peace of the grave for many Huguenots.

"While there are many who will agree that they, personally, should not kill, steal, enslave, it is only the individual with a first-rate moral nature who will have no hand in encouraging any agency — even government — in doing these things for him or others."

The international gold standard works without any action on the part of governments.

Over two decades before the Spanish Jesuit de Mariana, George Buchanan arrived, for the first time, at a truly individualist theory of natural rights and sovereignty — and therefore a justification for individual acts of tyrannicide.

 By the time the politicians are in charge, most of the eggheads will be in jail or in flight to Canada or Mexico.

The essential critical faculty cannot be developed when we copycat the questions and conclusions of others.