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,
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Mises often answers attacks on praxeology with a “minimalist” strategy. By this I mean that he denies that praxeology rests on controversial philosophical positions. By avoiding philosophical disputes, he tries to stay out of trouble he doesn’t need. He says, in effect, “We have an a priori grasp of the concept of action, and we can deduce various truths that follow from this concept. We also know that this concept applies to reality—actions exist. That’s all we need.” In what follows, I’ll give some examples of how Mises follows this strategy.
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Those of us who support a noninterventionist foreign policy find in Murray Rothbard’s work an inexhaustible source of facts and arguments. Mises, by contrast, usually doesn’t comment on foreign policy issues. Sometimes he did, but you won’t find in his published writings his views on the Cuban Missile Crisis or the Arab-Israeli conflict. I’d like to suggest, though, that a fundamental theme in his work supports noninterventionism.
In a famous lecture delivered in August 1819, the great classical liberal Benjamin Constant contrasts the ancient and modern conceptions of liberty. By the “ancient conception,” Constant means the liberty of the citizens of a state to rule themselves, as opposed to rule by despots, whether foreign or domestic. He has primarily in mind the ancient Greek city-states. He says that ancient liberty
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The GameStop saga shows some “equity” movements are more equal than others.
Last week, a large number of small-time investors drove up the price of GameStop’s (GME) stock a historic 1,784 percent. But this was no mere spike in some obscure stock.
Sometimes people claim the free market is unfair to future generations. Mises says again and again that capitalism is a system of “mass production for the masses” directed by the “dollar-votes” of consumers, and the consumers he is talking about are people who now exist. These people will act to secure their interests, but what about those who come after them? Don’t we have to consider the time “when like our sires, our sons are gone,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s phrase?
