In the past few weeks, I have been discussing a number of points in Human Action, and today I propose to concentrate on a fundamental insight that is a main theme of the book. There are, Mises says, only two ways to organize production in a complex modern economy that produces a great many goods and services. One is by centralized decision-making and the other is through the free market.
In the fall of 2016, I was a left communist. As I will show below, I came to this position after a circuitous tour through numerous sects of Marxism. A year later, I had thoroughly renounced Marxism and embraced the views of free market economists and philosophers Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. How did a career world tourist of left intellectual and radical movements find a home in libertarian social and economic thought? And why did it take twenty-five years to defect?
Once a society embraces the division of labor, direct exchange becomes increasingly infeasible. Without money, specialization is constrained; without money, dreams of constructing an advanced society are merely a utopian pipe dream. At its core, money is the lubricant for human relations. It simultaneously solves many problems of cooperation while serving as the basis for economic calculation. As awareness of nonsovereign cryptocurrencies has risen dramatically, questions about the history of money have gained salience. How does money arise? From where does it derive its value?
Luke Burgis’s Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life (St. Martin’s Press, 2021) is a popular exposition of the theories of the great French thinker René Girard. The book includes a passage that is of great value in understanding contemporary politics. “Obviously, the defense of victims is a good thing. At the same time, it brings new dangers. In the same way that scapegoating rituals in archaic religions were entirely practical—that is, they were used to achieve practical ends—so too can the defense of victims be used for practical purposes, James G.
President Joe Biden has failed his vaccination goal. According to the White House, it is unlikely that at least 70 percent of Americans will receive a first dose of the coronavirus vaccine by July 4. Despite this, officials say that Americans will still be protected enough to celebrate Independence Day with family and friends.
You heard that right. No ludicrous lockdowns or threat of lockdowns loom in the horizon.
It’s almost Independence Day, and for many Coloradans, that means a trip to Wyoming to buy illegal fireworks. That is, it’s time to buy fireworks that are illegal in Colorado, but legal in Wyoming.
New York City held its Democratic primary for mayor last week, and the initial results favored Brooklyn Borough president Eric Adams by a sizable margin.
But now officials say those results aren’t reliable at all and the Board of Elections botched the vote-counting process.
As the Washington Post now reports:
The greatest conspiracies are open and notorious—not theories, but practices expressed through law and policy, technology, and finance. Counterintuitively, these conspiracies are more often than not announced in public and with a modicum of pride. They’re dutifully reported in our newspapers; they’re bannered onto the covers of our magazines; updates on their progress are scrolled across our screens—all with such regularity as to render us unable to relate the banality of their methods to the rapacity of their ambitions.
