Below is an interesting discussion on foreign policy with John Mearsheimer.
Among other things, Mearsheimer declares that the neoconservatives “are in real trouble,” and that Obama is a closet realist. Mearsheimer has a point. Obama may in fact be a realist. His foreign policy has certainly been less reckless, although it just goes to show how insane American foreign policy is that Obama’s brand of it looks relatively prudent next to that of George W. Bush.
Here I go over the moderate view of libertarianism with Henrik Palmgren from Red Ice Creations. I explain why the welfare state creates poverty by creating non-intact families and I go over how the government subsidizing unemployment gives incentives for unemployment that would otherwise not be there in a libertarian world.
Peter G. Klein responds to a recent NPR story by Uri Berliner entitled “Coffee Futures: The Highs And Lows Of A Cup Of Joe”. Dr. Klein explains how a free market in coffee commodities would function. Klein is the Mises Institute’s Executive Director and Carl Menger Research Fellow.
Georgia Governor Nathan Deal has just signed an executive order enforcing the “price gouging” rule for propane during the cold emergency. That’ll certainly encourage new suppliers to enter the market. I remember when some entrepreneurs brought a big supply of drinking water to Charleston, SC, for $5/gallon (usually about $1) after Hurricane Hugo wrecked the city water supply. The state called that price gouging if it were sold for more than $1.25. They sold it...and never returned.
People have a strange habit of ridiculing economics for its assumptions and [benchmark] models of optimality. While modern mathematical economics (i.e., professional mathturbation) admittedly rely on sometimes outrageous assumptions that make most of the resulting predictions irrelevant, there is nothing ridiculous or unscientific about economic reasoning. In order to study the social world we need to consider and analyze what’s observed empirically from the point of view of the theory-derived counterfactual. Economic science necessarily begins with theory.
As noted by e.g. Reason.com, Yahoo! News recently reported that Swedes are increasingly turning their backs on their globally lauded utopian welfare state. While very little known, Sweden’s welfare state “worked” through the early 1970s thanks to deliberately preserving capitalist institutions and expanding its scope at a slower rate than the country’s overall economic growth.
Harry Binswanger, a leading Objectivist philosopher, advances a simple argument that he thinks suffices to undermine libertarian anarchism. The argument is found in his article of January 24 for Forbes, “Sorry, Libertarian Anarchists, Capitalism Requires Government.”
Mises and Rothbard taught that economics is a value-free science. Propositions of economics, such as the law of diminishing marginal utility, neither state nor imply any judgments about what is good or bad, right or wrong. Robert Grant, an Irish philosopher who teaches at Trinity College, Dublin, disagrees.
