John Finnis, for many years a professor at Oxford, is one the world’s greatest legal philosophers. Along with the late Germain Grisez, he is the foremost defender of a version of natural law theory called “new classical natural law theory.” In his fullest account of his legal theory, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford 1980), he argues that the right to acquire property, as defended by Robert Nozick, is subject to limits that severely weaken its force. Although he does not consider Murray Rothbard in the book, his argument would if correct apply to Rothbard’s theory as well.

With all but two relatively obscure states—Rhode Island and North Carolina—having ratified the Constitution, the Confederation Congress was now ready to put the new federal government in place. As soon as New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify, Congress dutifully created a committee to get the new Constitution up and running. Only the doughty Abraham Yates dissented—in a sense, the last attempt to block the Constitution as a whole.

In his “Philosophical Origins of Austrian Economics” (Mises Daily, June 17, 2006), David Gordon writes that Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk  maintained that concepts employed in economics must originate from reality—they need to be traced to their ultimate source in the real world. If one cannot trace it, the concept should be rejected as meaningless.

Since the 1800s, surly Americans have derided politicians for spending tax dollars “like drunken sailors.” Until recently, that was considered a grave character fault. But Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act shows that inebriated spending is now the path to national salvation.

It was a common saying in America in the 1930s that “we cannot squander our way to prosperity.” But that was before the latest “best and brightest” crop took the helm of the federal government.

A term has been coined for product sellers who shrink their packages, and thus, the amount of product in those packages, keeping the package price the same: shrinkflation. Anyone with a bit of good sense or economics training knows this is another form of price inflation, caused by what used to be the dictionary meaning of inflation; an increase in the supply of money. 

The recent felony conviction and eight month prison sentence of January 6th protester Paul Hodgkins is an affront to any notion of justice. It is a political charge and a political verdict by a political court. Every American regardless of political persuasion should be terrified of a court system so beholden to politics instead of justice.

We’ve seen this movie before and it does not end well.