The Montaigne Fallacy

“The Leitmotiv [i.e., an often repeated theme] of social philosophy up to the emergence of economics was: The profit of one man is the damage of another; no man profits but by the loss of others.  This is not a philosophy of social cooperation, but of dissociation and social disintegration.  For the sake of expediency, we call this doctrine after its proponent, essayist Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-92).  In the light of this Montaigne fallacy, human intercourse cannot consist in anything but the spoliation of the weaker by the stronger.”

Austrian Economics and Management Studies

As evidence of the growing interest in Austrian economics within management studies, note these sessions or papers at upcoming meetings of the major academic management societies, the Academy of Management (Boston, August 3-7) and the Strategic Management Society (Prague, October 6-9):
Austrian Economics & Creative Destruction Facilitator: Peter Klein, University of Missouri Austrian Economics in Organization Studies: How Austrian Ideas Contribute to Strategy, En

Who Should Be Ashamed? The USOC Versus Senator Harry Reid

So Senator Harry Reid, D-Nevada, thinks that the privately-funded United States Olympic Committee “should be ashamed” for providing its teams with uniforms made in China and that the uniforms should be “burned.” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Representative Steve Israel, both Democrats from New York, quickly weighed in on the controversy with a joint letter to the USOC expressing their displeasure.

Mind the Theory

I.

The saying that things may work nicely in theory, but do not necessarily work in practice is well known.1 It is typically meant to disparage the importance of theory, suggesting it would be too far removed from practical matters to help in solving the issue at hand.

Land Monopoly

“There are two types of ethically invalid land titles: “feudalism,” in which there is continuing aggression by titleholders of land against peasants engaged in transforming the soil; and land-engrossing, where arbitrary claims to virgin land are used to keep first-transformers out of that land.  We may call both of these aggressions “land monopoly”—not in the sense that some one person or group owns all the land in society, but in the sense that arbitrary privileges to land ownership are asserted in both cases, clashing with the libertarian rule of non-own

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