ABSTRACT: Isaiah Berlin made the distinction between negative liberty and positive liberty. Since then, prominent contemporary philosophers including Charles Taylor and Martha Nussbaum have declared negative liberty insufficient or incoherent. This is a critique of those declarations, which have been unduly accepted to a large extent. The critique primarily focuses on Taylor, who made the most direct and complete argument against negative liberty. His argument is shown to be ineffective. And further, his conception of positive liberty is shown to be incoherent.

Earlier this year I argued that the state is necessarily hostile to Christianity due to it being not only a rival pole of power in society, but because the state itself promotes its own religion in the form of progressivism. I noted at the time that legislation like the Equality Act is an attempt to force progressive dogma onto the rest of society and to further undermine and supplant the remaining vestiges of independence in society.

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Over the years, I’ve been pretty hard on the European Union. Both as an editor and a writer, I’ve published articles criticizing its central bank and its unelected, bureaucratic central government. Especially objectionable is the EU ruling class’s propensity for cynical politics built around threatening and intimidating voters and national governments who don’t conform to Brussels’s wishes.

In Human Action, Mises suggests that opposition to economic theory intensified as the theory developed. When the subjectivist school showed that economics isn’t limited to a separate sphere, but rather that all human action can be studied scientifically, the opposition went so far as to challenge reason itself.

Before economic theory got started, philosophers studied political and economic affairs from a normative standpoint. They tried to say how society should be organized, in the same way that they devised accounts of how human beings ought to act.

ABSTRACT: This essay develops a model to analyze jury independence. Jury independence can be seen as a game between elites and the citizens who make up the jury. This essay first presents a historical look at jury independence by looking at jury nullification. Then using the model developed, the evolution of jury independence is analyzed as well as how juries and the elites operate today.

I am sorry to have to report that Bob Wenzel has passed away. He was the editor and publisher of the popular websites Economic Policy Journal and Target Liberty and also published an investment newsletter. I met Bob many years ago at a Mises Institute conference and was immediately impressed by his enthusiasm for Austrian economics and libertarian theory.  He would throw himself into things with unmatched tenacity; he always wanted to find the inside story on events and usually succeeded in doing so. In my many conversations with him, his quick intelligence was apparent.