Humans have discovered the ethics of liberty over and over again throughout history. Of course, an ethical system for rational animals has to take account of the dynamic aspects of conflict, and not just zero sum scenarios. All other species in the world are not characterized after a vigorous a) capability and b) need, for owning and creating property. Men profit from a more advanced division of labor, whereas the animals and plants suffer when they compete for scare resources, since they cannot create more or just conceive of any alternatives for large numbers.
My post Knock It Off discusses Jacob Sullum’s Reason article about knockoffs in the high-fashion industry, and the lobbying by designers for copyright-like protection of clothing designs. A recent article in The New Yorker, The Piracy Paradox, also discusses this issue. There were two fascinating aspects to this story. First, the author notes that cheap knockoffs actually help the designers maintain high prices. Why?
The scholarship in chapter 4 of Hulsmann’s biography of Mises is immense and impressive. I’d encourage Hulsmann to make the core subject here — the place of Mengerian social science in the history of economic thought — the topic of his next book. A lot of the content discussed remains locked up in not readily available German language books, articles and documents (one of the great services of the Mises Institute is to make some of these works again available in English editions).
Just when you thought taxes and patents could not get any worse: Bush’s Top Economist Seeks Patent on His Own Tax Strategy (9/13/2007) reports on a patent application for a System And Method For Multi-State Tax Analysis, which claims:
This book by Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk is a supplement to his two great books, Capital and Interest and The Positive Theory of Capital. Here he takes on alternatives to the Austrian theory he had previously presented, and thereby clarifies the case. It is an excellent illustration of the economist’s stunning patience and capacity for thorough exposition.
For you Fed-heads, the papers from the Fed’s Jackson Hole Symposium are now on-line. From Dr. Robert Shiller of Yale University, Understanding Recent Trends in House Prices and Home Ownership.
For an earlier generation of American dissidents from the prevailing ideology of left-liberalism, a rite of passage was reading Albert Jay Nock’s Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, which appeared in 1943. William F. Buckley was hardly alone in seeing it as a seminal text crucial to his personal formation.
