Mises on His 125th Anniversary
"His outstanding moral quality was moral courage, the ability to stand alone, and an almost fanatical intellectual honesty and candor that refused to deviate or compromise an inch."
"His outstanding moral quality was moral courage, the ability to stand alone, and an almost fanatical intellectual honesty and candor that refused to deviate or compromise an inch."
But it should be clear that what distinguishes libertarianism from all competing political theories is its scrupulous adherence — informed by sound, i.e., Austrian, economics — to the idea that property rights in scarce resources must be assigned to the person with the best, objective link to the resource in question; and that, in the case of bodies, the link is the natural connection to and relationship between the occupant and the body, while for all other resources, the objective link is first use.
Prices are by definition determined by peoples' buying and selling or abstention from buying and selling.
In sum, protection and security contracts would come into existence. Furthermore, as a result of the continual cooperation of various insurers and arbitrators, a tendency toward the unification of property and contract law and the harmonization of the rules of procedure, evidence, and conflict resolution would be set in motion.
Praxeology tells us that human action is rational. The case being made for state action to remedy so-called irrationalities discovered by researchers in behavioral economics and finance has no logical justification.
Claims of ultimate ends, like happiness or well-being, are impossible, says Hobbes. In this life, the fact that you are still acting shows that you have not achieved any ultimate end. Does action really express dissatisfaction? You can act to keep something happening, rather than to try to change things.
The problem with this assumption is that it is quite impossible to construct a scale of measurement for human preferences — both for individuals and especially for groups of individuals.
Government involvement accounts for the internet's continuing problems, while the market should get the credit for its glories.
Roderick Long talks about value-subjectivism, and where Austrian economics is supposed to endorse a subjective sense of value.