Taxation is Robbery Part 2
When the State invades the right of the individual to the products of his labors it appropriates an authority which is contrary to the nature of things.
“The Tax Was Most Popular Before It Was Laid”
On this date in 1913, from the New York Times:
Walter Block on Austrian Economics as a Cult
Mainstream economists, especially those of the Chicago School, have often tried to dismiss the Austrian School as a cult. Here Walter Block takes on a couple of those accusers.
Is the NAP a Useless Tautology?
Julian Sanchez has carried criticism of the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP) to a new level. The principle tells us not to commit aggression; but, as Matt Zwolinski and others have pointed out, you don’t know what counts as “aggression” unless you know what rights people have. You can’t judge who the aggressor is simply by seeing who uses force first. The person who does so may be responding to a violation of rights and not be an aggressor at all.
Extensions of ABCT: The Fed’s Impact on Latin America
Nicolás Cachanosky, who recently completed his PhD at Suffolk University under Ben Powell (now at Texas Tech running the new Free Market Institute), has been hired by Metro State. Nicolás fills the position I vacated when I completed retirement from Metro following the Spring 2012 semester. Nicolás has just posted a new and potentially very important working paper “U. S.
Man, Economy, and Seoul
While walking Seoul’s Teheran Road, one gets the impression that this is the place to be. Like New York in happier times, Seoul is a capital magnet.
Zwolinski on the NAP
Matt Zwolinski, a libertarian political philosopher and the founder of the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, has a surprising proposal. Libertarians, he suggests, should drop the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP). The NAP holds that “aggression against the person or property of others is always wrong, where aggression is defined narrowly in terms of the use or threat of physical violence.”
I’ll Bet You Didn’t Expect This
In a recent review of David Stockman’s new book, The Great Deformation, Bloomberg columnist Clive Cook seeks to discredit Stockman by comparing him to Ron Paul. This is to be expected from a mainstream media pundit. What I did not expect and what set my heart aflutter was the following remark — more so because of its casual delivery:
The Price is Wrong – and So is Krugman
The cut-wages-through-inflation strategy is part of Krugman’s heads-I-win-tails-you-lose way of arguing.
The Rothbard/Higgs/Vedder and Gallaway Thesis Part III
In 2009, Lee Ohanian published the article, “What—or Who—Started the Great Depression,” in the prestigious Journal of Economic Theory (JET) in which he cited Murray Rothbard. For this article, Ohanian spent four years poring over wage data and culling information from sources related to Hoover and his administration.
