On John Stuart Mill
by Philip Kitcher
Columbia University Press, 2023; 152 pp.

John Stuart Mill wasn’t Murray Rothbard’s favorite philosopher, and Philip Kitcher’s short book would confirm this dislike. Rothbard viewed Mill as a fuzzy thinker, overly prone to compromise and averse to firm principles. These qualities are among those that lead Kitcher to praise Mill, but Rothbardians nevertheless have much to learn from Kitcher, who is a leading analytic philosopher, especially notable for his work on Immanuel Kant and the pragmatists.

Recently, I published an article in the Mises Wire, “Woke Egalitarianism and the Elites,” in which I presented the true intentions behind woke egalitarianism. The article also described how elites attempt to rebuild society through collectivism. But more than discussing the goals of progressivism, we need to discuss the intellectual basis of these attempts. What assumptions and intellectual framework guide these actions?

In 1971 Richard Nixon took the US off the last feeble vestiges of the gold standard, otherwise known as the Bretton Woods Agreement. That system had been a bizarre gold-dollar hybrid where the dollar was the world reserve currency but the US agreed to keep the dollar backed by gold.

We currently find ourselves in a bizarre wasteland of mainstream political discourse. These days no US institution, and indeed no corner of American life, is safe from politicization or even from becoming a mouthpiece for extreme activism.

On Saturday, Dr. Mark Thornton published a 3-minute recording for Minor Issues podcast on The Fed’s 2% Inflation Target. It had the usual honesty, integrity and simplicity readers of the Mises Institute are accustomed, with the introduction reading:

Mark Thornton explains the target as another smokescreen that was originally intended to stabilize monetary policy, currencies, and exchange rates, but has become a justification for inflation and central bank manipulation.

Every time the United States reaches its debt limit, we read that it is important to reach an agreement to lift it. The narrative is that the debt ceiling must be raised, or the US economy will suffer a severe contraction. There is even an episode of a TV series, “Designated Survivor”, where the character played by Kiefer Sutherland places lifting the debt ceiling as the priority to get the U.S. economy on track. The debt ceiling is viewed as an evil and anachronistic burden on growth. It is not.