Those who think ethics is bogus, and there are literally thousands of them in universities and colleges across the globe, seem unwilling to apply moral ambiguity where it actually does apply. For example, why are capitalist institutions so often subjected to blanket moral condemnation?
Modern Americans live lives considerably less simple than that of Henry David Thoreau on Walden Pond. But Thoreau's insights in "Civil Disobedience," writes Gary Galles, are more important in our far more complex world.
The main victims at the World Trade Center were, after all, working for the private sector. They were traders and merchants, people dedicated to economic enterprise. In an ironic tribute to their value, these people were targeted because the terrorists hoped to cripple the US economy. It would appear that the terrorists understood something that even our own elites do not understand.
This is the last formal lecture by Ludwig von Mises delivered May 2, 1970 at an economic seminar in Seattle, Washington.
In aiding drought-striken Canadian farmers, insurance providers can succeed where the state has failed. It is but a bit more evidence that private enterprise is more productive than the central planning of any government program, even those designed to create rain.
Capitalism is not so much a social system, writes Llewellyn Rockwell, but the natural result of a society wherein individual rights are respected, where businesses, families, and every form of association are permitted to flourish in the absence of coercion, theft, war, and aggression. In this way, and despite the current anti-business frenzy, capitalism is an indispensible expression of freedom.
Errors are an inevitable part of human action, writes Gene Callahan. If the future were certain, we would not need to act. Yet many economic models assume all economic actors possess perfect information, all plans are coordinated, and all adjustments to new data are made instantly and without cost.
Libertarianism favors the political ideals set forth in the early republic, writes Adam Young: an order of peace, free trade and individual self-government, where the state was restricted in its interference in the life of the churches, and the state was largely irrelevant to the economy and to the daily lives of the average American citizen.
In this excerpt from his new book, Gene Callahan explains that economics does not attempt to decide whether our choice of ends to pursue is wise. It does not tell us that we are wrong if we value a certain amount of leisure more than some amount of money. It does not view humans as being only worried about monetary gain. There is nothing "noneconomical" about someone giving away a fortune, or turning down a high-paying job to become a monk.
Mark Twain wrote long ago, but he seems at least as insightful about the government abuses we experience today as he was of those he observed directly. And the defense of liberty in modern America, with a government that has ballooned far beyond anything he could have anticipated, would certainly benefit from a healthy new dose of the same patriotic irreverence that animated Twain.
