Philosophy and Methodology

Free market economics is often ignorantly dismissed for being "ideological" rather than scientific. It probably sounds smart to the economically illiterate, but it is decidedly not.

Government statistics on worker productivity combine many errors of aggregation such as "average prices" and the total purchasing power of money. So it's unlikely that productivity numbers tell us much that's useful.

Is just aiding and abetting someone in committing an aggressive act a violation of the nonaggression principle? What if you were "just" driving the getaway car?

How can paternalists say that when they make it more difficult for you to smoke they aren’t interfering with your freedom? They've come up with a bizarre rationale.

In portraying the state as an integral part of economy and society, advocates of "state capacity libertarianism" ignore the state's unique political, i.e., predatory, nature.

Uncritically holding democracy out as an ideal overlooks the question of whether market democracy or political democracy better serves citizens.

In terms of economics, what currently is should be of very little importance: what matters, and that we should seek to understand, is the process that brought it about and that will create what will be in its place.

Bob Murphy gives a pragmatic case for pacifism.

Liberalism conceives of freedom as the absence of constraint, but Hegel's definition is more expansive. And, of course, the state is a necessary condition for it.

Some argue that someone’s superior talent or success is itself the result of mere luck. That claim, and its relevance as a justification for redistribution, has generated much controversy.