The Blockean Proviso

I was having an interesting discussion via email about one of Walter Block’s arguments. A quick summary. Block says that just as nature abhors a vacuum, libertarianism “abhors” unowned property; that the “whole purpose” of homesteading is to bring hitherto unowned virgin territory into private ownership.

Conservatism Turned Upside Down

It is a cliché of publishing to observe, when a book appears before the public years after it was first written, that it is more relevant now than ever. But it is difficult to think of how else The Betrayal of the American Right can be described. Murray N. Rothbard chronicles the emergence of an American right wing that gave lip service to free-market principles and “limited government,” but whose first priority, for which it was willing to sacrifice anything else, was military interventionism around the world.

Garrett Does It Again

It’s been a kick digging up all these lost books by Garet Garrett. What amazing insight he had in economics and politics! It turns out that he wrote a book in 1932 called The Bubble that Broke the World, now online. It is as the title suggests: a full scale analysis of the stock market crash, which he blames not on capitalism and market-driven excess but on credit expansion by the Fed.

I’d Have More Happiness Units if You Hadn’t Seized my TV

“Conservatives” in Britain are proposing a ban on plasma TVs, and are reviewing other electronics products as well for using too much energy, says the Sun.

My favorite line in the article, though, is this: “The group will also suggest scrapping Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a measure of the nation’s success in favour of a model that measures people’s happiness drawn up by Friends of the Earth.”

I could comment on this, but what is there to say?

Last Knight Live Blog 3 Kraus

With chapter 3, we are entering the beginnings of Mises’s life as scholar. There we have a very detailed account of how Mises’s outlook on matters of theory and policy were shaped, who influenced his early thinking and how it all relates to his later contributions to economics and social science in general. Mises’s formal university training was in law and government science at the University of Vienna.
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