“Liberals generally wish to preserve the concept of ‘rights’ for such ‘human’ rights as freedom of speech, while denying the concept to private property.  And yet, on the contrary, the concept of ‘rights’ only makes sense as property rights.”

—Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty

[Herbert Butterfield: History, Providence, and Skeptical Politics • By Kenneth B. McIntyre • Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2011 • Xv + 238 pages]

Yesterday morning my wife and I were planning to celebrate our wedding anniversary with dinner at an upscale restaurant.  We had been to the restaurant in the past  and were impressed by its  atmosphere and the quality of its meal ingredients, preparation, and service.  We also checked the menu online and decided our likely menu choices greatly exceeded their respective prices on “our” (i.e., her) value scale.  But by late yesterday afternoon, the cost of the meal had risen so much that we no longer c

“The economist must deal with doctrines, and not with men.  It is for him to critique errant doctrine; it is not his charge to uncover the personal motives behind heterodoxy.  The economist must face his opponents under the fictitious assumption that they are guided by objective considerations alone.  It is irrelevant whether the advocate of a false notion acts in good or bad faith; what matters is if the stated notion is true or false.”

—Ludwig von Mises, Memoirs

From the description:

In this never-before-seen video, Rothbard gives a tribute to his mentor in Austrian economics, Ludwig von Mises, at a Libertarian Party convention in Pennsylvania in 1984. Rothbard discusses Mises’s work and life, and the growing popularization of his ideas in the United States. Download an .mp3 version of this lecture here: http://bit.ly/Kh4jBj Please note: The audio cuts out for a few seconds at the three-minute mark due to the age of the original tape.

“Marxism makes use of the same method with regard to modern subjective economics.  Unable to oppose it by a single word of reasonable criticism, the Marxian tries to dispose of it by denouncing it as ‘bourgeois economics.’  To show that subjective economics is not ‘capitalist apologetics’ it should be sufficient, surely, to point out that there are socialists who stand firmly by the theory of subjective value.  The evolution of economics is a process of the mind, independent of the supposed class interests of economists, and has nothing