The mind engages in many activities which have power either for evil or good. Just what influence they will exert depends on how we use them. One of the most important of these activities is debate.

Recently, I took up reading Michel Foucault‘s Discipline and Punish, published in 1975. The most interesting part is the chapter on panopticism. Panopticism is a social theory of power, and how power structures evolve and spread throughout society. The name is derived from Jeremy Bentham‘s “Panopticon“. Bentham’s Panopticon was meant to be built.

“Second-best” policy recommendations can never find perfection (by definition). But if we are going to have the government providing a monopoly of domestic currency, Ludwig von Mises’s proposal for a return to a gold standard is theoretically elegant and eminently practical.

[Originally published in German in 1968]
 

I have a new piece today on Northwood University’s blog, “In Defense of Capitalism & Human Progress,” on “The Debt Crisis and the Fiscal Leviathan State.”

http://defenseofcapitalism.blogspot.com/2011/07/debt-crisis-and-fiscal-leviathan-state.html

Incredible that “A new French law requires listed firms to reserve 40% of board seats for women by 2017. Norway and Spain have similar laws; Germany is considering one. The European Parliament declared this month that such quotas should be applied throughout the EU.” The Economists patiently responds. I can’t think of a a surer way to discredit the status of any professional woman who has earned a higher status by merit than to enforce strict quotas.

Recently there fell into my lap 80 pages of fascinating correspondence between two of the most influential libertarian intellectuals of our time: the recently-deceased John Hospers, author of Libertarianism: a political philosophy for tomorrow and the first presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party (in 1972), and Morris Tannehill, the reclusive co-author (with his wife Linda) of the provocative and influential anarcho-liber