Philosophy and Methodology

Providing the opening for Mises’s great methodological work gave Rothbard the opportunity to set down his perspective on the importance of the praxeological method.

In this sweeping but brief history of classical liberalism, historian Ralph Raico recounts how this ideology has for centuries formed the only true intellectual opposition to despots and socialists over the past five hundred years.

A moral injustice is a legal injustice, period.

The division of labor promotes peaceful exchange and continues peace. But this can all break down when governments intervene to prevent peaceful interaction and when government incompetence promotes violence.

Michael Sandel doesn't like capitalism. But he can't seem to manage an economic argument for why. He's content to claim that capitalism is morally corrupting, converting anticapitalism into a sort of pseudoreligious faith.

"The natural condition of man is extreme poverty and insecurity. It is romantic nonsense to lament the passing of the happy days of primitive barbarism."

A moral injustice is a legal injustice, period.

"History cannot teach us any general rule, principle, or law. There is no means to abstract from a historical experience a posteriori any theories or theorems concerning human conduct and policies."

Freedom is not the ability to do what you want. This definition leads to all kinds of mischief, as freedom is really the absence of the threat of force.

A big reason that socialist ideology has staying power is the tactic of blaming the many failures and disasters of socialist regimes on the alleged fact the regimes "aren't real socialism."