Philosophy and Methodology

As readers will have anticipated, I think that Wood has once again imposed on history a philosophical view — in this instance, a theory of how intellectual influence works.

Let’s pull this sentence out of the civic pieties of our time and see what’s wrong with it: “We should all volunteer our time in

Again, this is not just about terminology. It is about the assumptions many people bring to the subject of economics as it affects ethics.

Mises's great insight was that economic reasoning has its foundation in just this understanding of action; and that the status of economics as a sort of applied logic derives from the status of the action-axiom as an a priori-true synthetic proposition.

The liberal looks with increasing favor upon the socialization of industry, or as it is sometimes called, the democratization of industry. The radical keeps pointing out that while this is all very well in its way, monopoly values will as inevitably devour socialized industry as they now devour what the liberals call capitalistic industry.

Against this, there seems little reason to place more confidence in international bureaucrats than their national counterparts; and steps to centralized power have historically been inimical to liberty.

No subject is so much discussed today — or so little understood — as inflation.

Markets make more people fit rather than triggering a "dog eat dog" fight for survival. Private property prevents the law of the jungle rather than enabling it.

Communism is extreme socialism; socialism is extreme statism.

Laissez-faire is natural, moral, and biblical.