Philosophy and Methodology

Choosing between labor and leisure is not like choosing between apples and oranges. Many people like both kinds of fruit. But labor involves disutility, so a better choice is this: between apples and rotten oranges.

If we insist on "collective" responsibility assigned to entire nations, then we must naturally punish the innocent along with the guilty.

Bob Murphy explains why the Intelligent Design movement will be to the natural sciences what the Public Choice school in economics is to the social sciences.

Can a scientific law allow us to predict the course of history? Marxists lean in this direction, but Karl Popper says it's impossible. Is he right?

Economics today poses as a predictive discipline which fails to correctly predict anything; a prescriptive discipline which prescribes the wrong policies; and an empirical discipline which collects data but misses the point.

Susan Neiman contends Southerners need to acknowledge guilt for slavery, segregation, and lynching, and "work off" the past. But collective responsibility is a chimera, and a dangerous one at that.

"The reality must be faced that the new…colony of Pennsylvania lived for the greater part of four years in a de facto condition of individual anarchism, and seemed none the worse for the experience."

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?