Salim Rashid (1990) purports to have established some facts about Adam Smith’s scholarship, significant among which are (a) Smith’s plagiarism, (b) the poor quality of Smith’s arguments or ideas compared with those of his predecessors or contemporaries, and (c) Smith’s inconsistent arguments regarding laissez faire. Alas, Rashid’s case is faulty, as well as often misleading and vexatious.
In describing Adam Smith’s acknowledgments as “neo-plagiarism” (Rashid, 1990), was trying to characterize a situation where a scholar either borrows ideas from others but provides no acknowledgment, or had access to fruitful and important ideas yet seems to have ignored them.
I may, as a result of long endeavors to trace the destructive effect which the invocation of ‘social justice’ has had on our moral sensitivity, and of again and again finding even eminent thinkers thoughtlessly using the phrase, have become unduly allergic to it, but I have come to feel strongly that the greatest service I can still render to my fellow men would be that I can make ... speakers and writers ... thoroughly ashamed...to employ the term ‘social justice’.
In this article, David Gordon offers a review of George H. Smith’s Atheism, Ayn Rand, and Other Heresies.
A government is a territorial monopolist of compulsion — an agency which may engage in continual, institutionalized property rights violations and the exploitation — in the form of expropriation, taxation and regulation — of private property owners. Assuming no more than self-interest on the part of government agents, all governments must be expected to make use of this monopoly and thus exhibiting a tendency toward increased exploitation. However, not every form of government can be expected to be equally successful in this endeavor or to go about it in the same way.
Libertarians tend to focus on two important units of analysis: the individual and the state. And yet, one of the most dramatic and significant events of our time has been the re-emergence—with a bang—in the last five years of a third and much neglected aspect of the real world, the “nation.”
Politics asks “What is to be done?” and proposes a profusion of answers. Philosophy, when set to contend with politics, asks “when can one sensibly say that something, or for that matter anything, is to be done?” That answers to this question are neither wholly formal, logical and semantic, nor wholly empirical and technological, but both, and more than either, is, I think, plain enough.
The idea of secession has been around ever since there have been governments. It is an especially relevant topic today, as the emerging democracies in Eastern and Central Europe attempt to form new, stable political and economic units. The idea of secession, however, should not be limited to new and emerging democracies. The idea has relevance wherever a substantial portion of the population is dissatisfied with its current political arrangement.
The violent breakup of Yugoslavia illustrates the growing difficulty of theorizing about the future of multi-ethnic states. Who would have predicted that Yugoslavia, which until recently had been hailed as a “model multi-ethnic socialist state,” would come to an end, only seventy-three years after it was created?
Libertarians’ devotion to individual rights, and to laws in support of those rights, is unquestionable. Most of the laws favored by libertarians can be shown to be consistent with our individual rights — unlike the blatantly illegitimate laws advocated by socialists. Despite this, however, many libertarians overlook important procedural or structural requirements that must accompany any legal system in which substantively justifiable law can develop and last.
