Walter Block is a radical anarchist. He is a libertarian extremist. The government probably spends oodles of fiat currency investigating, monitoring and keeping detailed records of Block’s activities. More is undoubtedly spent each year in order to produce propaganda to counter his promotion of Austrian economics.
The human body shield problem is the following scenario. A criminal, holding your innocent neighbor in front of him, approaches you and begins shooting at you. You can stop him, but only by shooting through your neighbor and killing them both.
Property might be defined as something over which an individual should have exclusive control. For example, suppose you have some string and it is your property. It follows that you should be the one to decide whether you use it to tie up some boxes or your neighbor uses it to hang a painting. These two actions are incompatible, and the owner, for whatever reason, has the authority to determine what happens.
Modern military engagements are made possible by a state’s ability to easily acquire revenue. Central banking and the circulation of fiat currency enable the state to control the money supply and to fund any national interest the government deems worthy.
This paper looks at rights and the protection of rights from the minarchist and the anarchist perspectives. The small government view is represented by Objectivist Ayn Rand as well as Neo-Objectivists Tibor Machan and David Kelley. The no-government perspective relies primarily on anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard. Minarchists argue for the need for government in order to protect rights; otherwise, they claim, mob rule would prevail.
Through new legislation1 intended to alleviate poverty, the 1960s proved to be a time of bureaucratic discovery and administrative experimentation. This decade witnessed the first man on the moon and the war in Vietnam.
Times of uncritically accepting the application of methods of natural science to human science are seemingly gone. In the present age, we usually deal with so-called “crypto-positivism,” which revised certain assumptions, but is still stuck in the ideal of science professed more geometrico. Hans-Hermann Hoppe is a philosopher whose theoretical effort proves that the errors of naturalism and empiricism can be overcome only by praxeology based on a priori argumentation.
In The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, Bryan Caplan attempts to forge a new direction for public choice theory by arguing that, contrary to accepted belief, voters make irrational political choices. Throughout his book, Caplan refers to particular anti-economic biases amongst citizens, which he feels challenge the commonly held assumption that voters are rational.
In today’s society, a peculiar understanding of distributive justice has developed which holds that social justice must be distributed by the coercive force of government (Arnhart 1968; Bastiat 1968; Bragues 2009; de Jasay 2007; Dorn 2010; Ebeling 1999; Foley, Jr. 1984; Hayek 1944; Hayek 1962; Maloberti 2009; Narveson 2009; Santelli, Jr. et al. 2002). This idea, as Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations argues, developed most notably from the reign of Queen Elizabeth (Smith 2007) and lasted until the French Revolution (Ginzberg 2002).
In the US a dismal truth exists about the citizenry’s lack of understanding of economic fundamentals. Perhaps the best example which illustrates this point is the April 2010 US Senate Hearings into the financial crisis. JPMorgan Chase’s Managing Director and Senior Economist James E.
