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Former president Donald Trump has been impeached for “incitement to insurrection.” The House Democrats’ claim is that Trump made an inflammatory speech which—a week later—led to the Capitol riot of January 6.
The Senate is now considering whether or not to convict Trump of this “crime.”
I put “crime” in scare quotes for a couple of reasons.
The title of my column is misleading, in that I’m not going to comment on what policies should be adopted toward COVID-19. Instead, I want to address some remarks by Leslie Green, a philosopher of law who teaches at Oxford. Green is very influential, and his book The Authority of the State is well worth reading. (Many years ago, I was involved in a controversy with him in the philosophy journal Analysis.) But in a recent blog post, he suggests a way of thinking about freedom that is dangerous.
One of the first free market books I read, back in the early 1960s, was William Graham Sumner’s What Social Classes Owe Each Other.
Last week, I talked about Mises and moral relativism, and in doing so I suggested a fundamental rule for understanding Mises. He always tries to defend the free market and his style of praxeological economics from any attack by other types of thought. Although he was a scholar of great learning and says interesting and valuable things about many different subjects, he is not trying to defend a particular philosophical system. This week, I’ll extend the discussion to one aspect of religion and theology. Once more, the same principle applies.
The political theorist Douglas W. Rae, who has taught at Yale University for decades, likes Hayek’s account of freedom but wants to expand what counts as coercion. By doing so, he hopes to be able to extend the amount of permissible redistribution from what Hayek allows.
I’d like to continue the discussion of Scott Sehon’s article “No, the Nazis Were Not Socialists” that I began last week. At the end of my article, I berated Sehon. He says that the word “socialist” in the name of the Nazi Party (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) doesn’t show that the Nazis were really socialist.
After years of delay and endless debates over the long-term relationship between the EU and the UK, Brexit is finally done. At least, it’s done for now. The EU and the UK appear to have struck a trade deal and a deal over the general relationship between them.
When it was fully part of the EU, the UK was limited in efforts to unilaterally strike trade deals with countries that weren’t part of the EU. UK trade had to be approved by EU bureaucrats.
But that’s no longer the case, the UK is now more free to look beyond Europe for building up global trade.
Near the beginning of Human Action, Mises makes a remarkable statement: “it is in this subjectivism that the objectivity of our science [economics] lies” (p. 21). What does he mean by this? How can a science be objective by being subjective.
Two of the leading British moral philosophers in the years after the end of World War II clashed about America’s dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and their clash has much to teach us about the principles that should govern a free society. The two thinkers are R.M. Hare and Elizabeth Anscombe. I’ll start with Hare because his way of looking at moral decisions is one many people will find reasonable, even if they don’t agree with his conclusions in this particular case. But it is Anscombe’s position that will teach us the most.
John Stuart Mill was more favorable to socialism than David Ricardo and his followers, even though Mill in economics was generally a Ricardian. In the preface to the third edition of his Principles of Political Economy (1852), he says that the main obstacle to socialism is that people might not yet be civilized enough to put it into practice. When people reach this higher state he isn’t sure what they will decide.
Mill says,
