Prof. Hans Hoppe, a fairly recent immigrant from West Germany, has brought an enormous gift to the American libertarian movement. In a dazzling breakthrough for political philosophy in general and for libertarianism in particular, he has managed to transcend the famous is/ought, fact/value dichotomy that has plagued philosophy since the days of the scholastics, and that had brought modern libertarianism into a tiresome deadlock.
Catallactics, the theory of the market economy, is not a system of theorems valid only under ideal and unrealizable conditions and applicable to reality merely with essential restrictions and modifications. All the theorems of catallactics are rigidly and without any exception valid for all phenomena of the market economy, provided the particular conditions that they presuppose are present. It is, for instance, a simple question of fact whether there is direct or indirect exchange.
Class consciousness, says Marx, produces class ideologies. The class ideology provides the class with an interpretation of reality and at the same time teaches the members how to act in order to benefit their class. The content of the class ideology is uniquely determined by the historical stage of the development of the material productive forces and by the role the class concerned plays in this stage of history. The ideology is not an arbitrary brain child. It is the reflection of the thinkers material class condition as mirrored in his head.
After much thought and after twitching back and forth between different options, we decided to take the plunge and get iPhones. These things are amazing, to say the least. I used to say that the iconic gizmo of the early twentieth century would be the iPod. I was wrong. It’s the iPhone. It’s one thing to be able to carry a few thousand songs in your pocket. It’s something else to be able to carry songs and other media on a device from which you can also surf the web and record hi-def video. Or blog, as I just finished doing.
I just walked through the house, and now I’m looking around the breakfast room where I type. One thing is certain: I have a lot of stuff. Last week, I helped one of my best friends move. As it turns out, he has a lot of stuff too.
I thought that how we produce, consume, and dispose of stuff was a fairly straightforward process. According to Annie Leonard, host of The Story of Stuff, I was wrong.
Leonard’s video has become a hit on YouTube, with over one million views — and there is even a book now available.
Much of the confusion prevailing in the historical study of liberalism can be traced to John Stuart Mill, who occupies a vastly inflated position in the conception of liberalism entertained by English-speaking peoples.1 This “saint of rationalism” is responsible for key distortions in the liberal doctrine on a number of fronts.
There has been a bit of chatter about this article in the Wall Street Journal about the costs of employment. Here, for example, is Mark Perry. The cost of providing a job that pays $44,000 (gross) and provides $12,000 in benefits is much, much higher than it at first appears. Enthusiasm for ever-larger piles of mandates on employers is only going to make this worse.
The US health care system is a complete mess, our % of GDP spending on health care isn’t that surprising given that health care is a super-normal good–meaning roughly that our consumption of health care rises more rapidly than our incomes–and the US is extremely wealthy, and yet it works decently well on some margins. Nationalizing health care, especially in a country that is as politically explosive as the US, will probably shut off even the things American health care does well.
