Here’s a question, paraphrased from Charles Calomiris via Deirdre McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce: would those who protest globalization and the steady march of economic freedom change their minds if they were convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that the globalization, economic growth, and economic freedom they’re willing to fly around the world to denounce was lifting people out of poverty around the world? Would they change their minds if they knew that reversing globalization would harm the world’s poor? I fear the answer.

Today on NPR’s All Things Considered there was a discussion of extending unemployment benefits. The liberal view that unemployment insurance was a good thing and that the benefits should be extended was taken for granted. Mention was made that Democrats and Republicans in Congress disagree on how to fund an expansion of benefits. Then a conservative was interviewed who talked about the need for a social safety net and fairness.

Setting your entire production structure on the whims and fancies of bureaucrats and politicians, based upon central-planning diktat rather than local voluntary money prices, quickly leads to economic chaos.

[The original version of this paper was delivered at the Second Annual Libertarian Scholars’ Conference, New York City, October 26, 1974, as a response to a paper by Leonard Liggio.]
 

In the popular academic mind, the doctrine of class conflict seems to be inextricably linked to the particular Marxist version of the idea. Lip service is often paid — especially by those eager to diminish the claims to originality of Marx and Engels — to the fact that these writers had precursors in this approach to social reality.

[This article is excerpted from chapter 21 of Human Action, the Scholar’s Edition and is read by Jeff Riggenbach.]

1. Methodological Dualism

Mortal man does not know how the universe and all that it contains may appear to a superhuman intelligence. Perhaps such an exalted mind is in a position to elaborate a coherent and comprehensive monistic interpretation of all phenomena. Man — up to now, at least — has always gone lamentably amiss in his attempts to bridge the gulf that he sees yawning between mind and matter, between the rider and the horse, between the mason and the stone.

In recent months, fiscal austerity among governments on all levels has come to the political fore, albeit for different reasons.

In some cases, such as Greece, belt-tightening measures were essential to avert a sovereign-debt crisis. The Greek government enacted significant deficit-reduction solutions in order to receive monetary aid from the International Monetary Fund and European Union. In so doing, it continued the de facto monetization of Greek debt by the European Central Bank.

[Excerpted from Defending the Undefendable. An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Jeff Riggenbach, is available for download.]