Philosophy and Methodology

Envy-based policies seem to persist, whether in the form of progressive taxation or in assumptions that a state like New York can decide something as subjective as the reasonableness of salary contracts freely agreed upon.

Ron Paul is well aware of the limited value of the Constitution: it is a far from ideal arrangement. Nevertheless, it remains the fundamental law of the United States and, if interpreted correctly, provides an excellent means to check the depredations of a government that violates its provisions.

They tell us how much better off economically we all are in war than in peace.

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.