Philosophy and Methodology

The Nobel committee this year showed that it has embraced clever economic modeling as a replacement for scientific progress.

For the positivist, a man is a machine like an automobile, and the positivist denies to his fellow men the faculty of choosing ends and the means to attain these ends.

Austrian economics in particular provides the historian with a theoretical apparatus that equips him with the ability to make disembodied statistics tell a coherent and accurate story.

The state of economic science in academia is the reason why Mises University is the most important week of the year.

Jevons called Cantillon's Essai the "Cradle of Political Economy." It was one of the few books quoted by Adam Smith and it deserves reading by any serious thinker of political economy today.

No organization has more money at its disposal than the US government, which attracts thieves and con men at least in full proportion to its control of wealth.

Hayek was forced to conclude that the term "social justice" was "entirely empty and meaningless” and is generally used to assert a claim without giving a reason for it.

Those who oppose "consumerism" contend it is wrong to give consumers what they want if they want the wrong things.

Who would join a radical minority movement, and commit him- or herself for life to social obloquy and a marginal existence, for the sake of 20% more bathtubs, or 15% more candy bars? Who will man the barricades either physically or spiritually, for more peanuts or Pepsi?

"Liberalism" has always been the proper name of the ideology of freedom and free markets. But almost from the beginning, illiberal theorists claimed the name for themselves.