The recent school shootings have led many people to want to restrict or deny altogether our right to own guns, and in these troubled times, it is all the more essential to bear in mind the reasons for that right. To that end, I’d like in this week’s column to discuss the excellent essay by the philosopher Lester H. Hunt “Guns and Self-Defense,”
People usually don’t study the philosopher George Santayana very much today, and he was not a libertarian, but rather a “skeptical conservative.” Ludwig von Mises took him seriously, though, and often quotes him, though sometimes to disagree; and in this week’s article, I’d like to look at what he says about the state in Human Society , the second
Michael Munger, a political scientist and economist who teaches at Duke University, argues in his excellent essay “Libertarianism and Public Choice,” included in The Routledge Companion to Libertarianism , that public choice offers a more persuasive defense of free-market libertarianism than natural rights. In this week’s article, I’m going to
Robert Nozick is probably most familiar to readers of this column as a libertarian political philosopher, but this week I’d like to look at another issue, relevant not only to libertarians but to anyone interested in moral and political thought, which he discusses in his last book, Invariances (Harvard, 2001.) This is whether our beliefs about
It would be easy to write a very negative review of Robert Kuttner’s Going Big (New Press, 2022), but it would be a mistake to do. Kuttner is a well-known progressive economist and the founder of the Economic Policy Institute. He is an ardent New Dealer who regrets that political exigencies, as well as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s own hesitancies, made
In last week’s article, I discussed some of the arguments Yoram Hazony gives in his book Conservatism: A Rediscovery in favor of an empiricist procedure in ethics that supports working within a particular national tradition and against the rationalist deductive method of those who without empirical evidence defend the supreme value of freedom by
Is there a case to be made for universal basic income? David Gordon examines the pro-UBI arguments by philosopher Matt Zwolinski. Original Article: “To UBI or Not to UBI, That Is the Question” This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher
Capitalism is often blamed for the effects of policies that aren’t capitalism. This is why we need a better definition of capitalism. Original Article: “ What’s in a Name? Why the Definition of Capitalism Matters “ This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher
Egalitarian liberals think that basic liberties can be violated in the quest for equality and even that “the natural duty to promote justice straightforwardly implies a duty to establish states.” Original Article: “Liberty versus “Relational Egalitarianism”” This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher
What We Owe the Future por William MacAskill Basic Books, 2022; 333 pp. William MacAskill, profesor de filosofía en Oxford y figura destacada del movimiento del altruismo efectivo, ha sido noticia recientemente por la financiación frenética y fraudulenta de su protegido Sam Bankman-Fried, que ahora está a la espera de juicio. Los «altruistas
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.