In a recent issue of The Journal of Libertarian Studies, Frank van Dun commented on my views on intellectual property, and on Walter Block’s views on blackmail. In this reply, I will concentrate on two aspects of Van Dun’s comments: the non-aggression principle & libertarianism, and trademark & contract.
In his article “Natural Law and the Jurisprudence of Freedom,” my friend and colleague Frank van Dun offers two options as my possible categorizations of his views: “anti-libertarian” or “confusion and inconsistency on the part of a libertarian sympathiser.”1 Given these two sharp alternatives, I choose the second, for I certainly do not consider him “anti-libertarian.” To the contrary, I consider him one of the leading libertarian theorists of the present day.
The law & economics movement has become one of the most dynamic schools within economics. Its origin is often dated back to the University of Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s, but insights about the interconnections of economics and the law can be found in the works of earlier economists.
In this article, Steven Yates reviews Tibor Machan’s The Passion for Liberty and Putting Humans First: Why We Are Nature’s Favorite.
In this article, Laurence M. Vance reviews Clint Bolick’s Voucher Wars: Waging The Legal Battle Over School Choice.
Kant’s account of property rights is embedded within his general ethical system, centered on the Categorical Imperative described in the Groundwork and the second Critique. Also, we must look to the account of teleology put forth in the Critique of Judgment and in his shorter political essays if we are to understand the ultimate ground of Kant’s thinking on property rights.
This article will explore the economics of legal tender laws, arguing that they are not only a necessary prerequisite of paper money, but also benefit fractional-reserve banking. Such laws make paper money and fractional-reserve banking more widespread than they would otherwise be. Thus, legal tender laws must be understood as a major factor in the development of Western economies which today operate on paper-money standards and feature very large fractional-reserve banking sectors that grow at over-proportional rates.
This article contains two parts that correspond to the two main fields of monetary theory. The first part examines the evolution of Mises’s analysis of the value of money, and the second part investigates developments in his banking theory.
For many libertarians, the thesis of self-ownership is the foundation of their political philosophy. Natural rights to life, liberty, and property—the protection of which is, according to the libertarian, government’s sole legitimate function—derive from self-ownership, in particular one’s ownership of his body and its parts, of his capacities and labor, and, by extension, of whatever he can acquire by his non-coercive exercise of them.
