In his “A Groundwork for Rights: Man’s Natural End,” Douglas Rasmussen takes issue with a paper I presented at the Fifth Annual Libertarian Scholar’s Conference in which I was concerned with the difficulty of demonstrating the validity of natural rights doctrines in general and the libertarian natural rights doctrines in particular.
There are those to whom the question of whether to privatize the nation’s police forces is mere academic whimsy—a question of consequence only to the eggheads and cranks of the Academy, not to those who so solidly inhabit the “real world.” Most of these believe the enforcement of law to be the exclusive province of the state. Such a belief is rooted in an obvious falsehood: the notion that there is a unique and singular commodity called “enforcement of law.” There is, in fact, no such singular commodity.
Patrick M. O’Neil and David Osterfeld have offered some criticisms of our natural end interpretation and defense of Rand’s ethics. This essay is a rejoinder to these criticisms. It consists of two parts: (I)a reply to O’Neil and (II)a reply to Osterfeld. In the case of the latter, we will confine ourselves to commenting only on those statements which constitute criticisms of our position. We will not discuss Osterfeld’s own views regarding the foundation of ethics.
The recent widely cited National Agricultural Lands Study (NALS) adds to the growing number of individuals and organizations holding the view that land resources are too important to be left to the “whims of market forces.” In this view, there should be a shift from private ownership of land to social or political control of land use.
In this note I will argue that social contract theories aimed at establishing norms for personal and community life are inadequate. Briefly, I show that in Kant and Rawls the alleged contractual basis for the legitimacy of law and government is supplemented with the very strict requirement of self-consistency of the resulting norms. Once, however, Kant’s and Rawls’s own framework for the social con- tract thesis is abandoned, as it ultimately will have to be for various reasons, what is left is not a social contract but rationality as the basis of norms.
Over the span of one hundred and fifty years, dissatisfaction with one or more of the fundamental postulates of theoretical economics has given impetus to the development of new “theoretical” sciences. Depending upon one’s viewpoint, scientific socialism, sociology, institutional economics, and so on may represent several such attempts, or they may represent a single multifaceted effort. Whichever the case, the order of procedure in such undertakings is straightforward.
This paper by Carl Watner discusses the property rights of Native Americans.
That philosophic ideas count is no news to Austrian economists, whose economic theories rest on conceptual analyses of action and value. But philosophy can confuse as well as guide. In this article, I will discuss two philosophical mistakes that in recent times have supported dangerous idiocy while undermining the market.
In this essay, the author updates his monograph The Literature of Isolationism: A Guide to Non-Interventionist Scholarship, 1930-1972 (Colorado Springs, Colo.: Ralph Myles, 1972).Only rarely will material from the earlier volume he repeated here. This essay supplements, not replaces, the earlier work. It was originally written in 1980 for a seminar sponsored by the World Without War Council, Berkeley, California, but it is updated even further.
This paper by Antoin E. Murphy reviews Richard Cantillion’s life and works.
