Thomas Piketty’s book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has received lots of press and been reviewed dozens of times, so I’m not going to write a general review, but I do want to comment on his depiction of capital, contrasting it with a more Austrian approach.
Anarchists are constantly tempted to respond to their critics in a way that verges on the tu quoque fallacy — in children’s playground lingo, “it takes one to know one” — because often a critic’s claim about the horrors that anarchy would bring is essentially a claim that it would bring about a condition that already exists under the rule of states. Why the warlords would take over, the critic claims. But what are states but warlord organizations in their most developed expression? Why we’d have no protection against thieves and marauders, the critic claims.
The World Bank is a secretive multilateral organization that wastes many billions of dollars a year siphoning taxpayer dollars to foreign governments as part of a loan portfolio that emphasizes loan volume over loan profitability. Under normal circumstances, banks that reward volume over profit would not last long, but when the institution is protected from market forces and has access to conscripted capital emanating from member governments’ access to tax dollars, it can last many decades with the grateful support of crony firms that are the actual beneficiaries of its loans.
The Washington Post explains that drug legalization in Colorado and Washington, along with Medical Marijuana Legalization in many other states has hurt the illegal marijuana growing business in northern Mexico. However, the Mexican drug cartels have been bailed out by America’s drug warriors who have cracked down on prescription pain killers.
Marc Abela, organizer of the Mises Meetings in Japan (Abela is interviewed about libertarianism in Japan here) sends along this photo of himself with Tatsuya Iwakura.
J. Michael Oliver tells us that this remarkable book began as an academic thesis written in 1972 and submitted the next year for a graduate degree at the University of South Carolina. The book is much more than an academic thesis, though; it is a distinguished addition to libertarian thought.
