Philosophy and Methodology

The most charming city on the Rhine — one of the most charming in all Germany or in the whole wide world for that matter — is the city of Bonn.

Hence, it is scientifically meaningless to say that the "probability of Jerry Ford being elected in 1976 is three-eighths," since elections are not homogeneous events repeated a large number of times. And yet a large amount of modern social science and of its mathematizing rests on this faulty view of probability theory.

Congress decreed that gold and silver dollars should be interchangeable and put upon the Treasury a mandate to keep them equal in value. How?

Not all reforms are improvements. As we have seen, the 100-percent-reserve solution is ripe with unintended consequences.

John Calvin's social and economic views closely parallel Luther's, and there is no point in repeating them here. There are only two main areas of difference: their views on usury, and on the concept of the "calling."

Capitalism sought to unleash the cooperative and competitive spirits of the human person and ended up abolishing scarcity in life's most valuable things.

"Rothbard here is rather writing as an ideological polemicist about what thinkers are 'good for the team,' and his critiques even beyond this book often had that spirit."

"Market prices can get screwed up when the Fed tinkers with interest rates. Because of the distorted price signals, the actual real resources are invested improperly."

"In Thomist thought, reason and empiricism are not separated but allied and interwoven. Truth is built up by reason on a solid groundwork in empirically known reality. The rational and empirical were integrated into one coherent whole."

In a free market of justice, police making many errors would thus quickly be eliminated by bankruptcy.