Two Concepts of Rationality
Volume 2, Article 5 (2010)
1. Introduction
no Person can disobey Reason, without giving up his Claim to be a rational Creature
—Swift (1726, 261)
no Person can disobey Reason, without giving up his Claim to be a rational Creature
—Swift (1726, 261)
In the United States alone, there are thousands of people every year whose lives could be saved by means of a liver or kidney transplant but who die because organs are unavailable. Even the tens of thousands who obtain a transplant often have to wait years for an operation, during which time their quality of life and their post-operative prospects deteriorate. A sure way of increasing supply to meet the demand is to permit live donors to sell their organs in a competitive market.
With the end of WWII in 1945 the United States looked forward to a future that promised prosperity and peace for all Americans. Liberals predicted the coming of a new era of freedom in American politics and society based on the principles of New Deal policies. They believed that the lessons of successful government intervention in the economy during the Great Depression, and the bureaucratic controls that had built the industrial war machine that won the ‘Good War,’ could be applied in post-WWII America.
In his 1971 book, Betrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard argued that the Old Right in American politics, those isolationists and libertarians who had provided conservative opposition to New Deal liberal ideas since 1933, had been ‘betrayed’ by 1964. Led by William F.
The thesis proposed in this paper is that strong as the protection of private property rights may seem to be in the United States, the lesson from Prof. Rothbard’s account of the history of money and banking in the U.S. has been one of the relativization of those rights, especially through interventions in the monetary and financial arrangements whenever the necessities of war financing so required.
Institutions and Progress
In a lengthy footnote to his essay “Reconciling Anarchism and Minarchism”1 (henceforth RAM) Tibor Machan accuses me of engaging in equivocation, and also of psychologising, in my essay “The Facts of Reality: Logic and History in Objectivist Debates about Government”
On July 20, 2009 a 41 year old lobsterman from the island of Matinicus was shot in the neck over a property dispute.1 The islanders, like many Northeastern Lobstermen, have a property regime in place that is enforced by a series of acts against lob
WILL THE US ECONOMY FACE a sustained period of inflation or deflation, or perhaps hyperinflation? This is the subject of the great monetary debate of our day. It comprehends in its consequence nothing less than the fate of the world’s most important markets; from the international currency market to the US stock and bond markets to labor markets across the globe. The fate of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the viability of the subsisting monetary order rest on the denouement of the monetary process being debated.
The misery of essentialism in his time, or at least of the philosophy of liberty, is condensed by Popper into a remarkable summary: “Scholasticism, mysticism and despair of reason—these are the inevitable outcomes of Platonic and Aristotelian essentialism.