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Hans Hoppe’s famous “argumentation ethics” has generated a great deal of attention among libertarians, and deservedly so. Has Hoppe produced an ironclad demonstration that people have libertarian rights? I don’t propose to contribute to that discussion on this occasion. Rather, I should like to focus on a preliminary issue. It is one to which

Eric Mack is one of the foremost contemporary philosophers who support the free market. He has for many years been concerned with the “anarchist-minarchist” dispute. In a “state of nature” in which people’s rights to self-ownership and private property are generally recognized, most individuals would find it in their interest to hire private

John Finnis, for many years a professor at Oxford, is one the world’s greatest legal philosophers. Along with the late Germain Grisez, he is the foremost defender of a version of natural law theory called “new classical natural law theory.” In his fullest account of his legal theory, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford 1980), he argues that the

Critics of Austrian economics often say that praxeology lacks rigor. Praxeologists rely on imprecise verbal logic that is difficult to assess. Instead, modern neoclassical economics is to a large extent couched in mathematics. The definitions and axioms of the model used are stated exactly, and then theorems can be proved to follow from them.

  Trust in a Polarized Age Kevin Vallier Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021, 310 + x pp. David Gordon (dgordon@mises.com) is a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute. Kevin Vallier, who teaches philosophy at Bowling Green State University, is a leading advocate of “public reason liberalism,” and his latest book is a distinguished contribution to

The philosopher Michael Huemer is usually favorable to the free market, and he is also a strong defender of anarchism. Although I disagree with some of the arguments in his defense of anarchism, The Problem of Political Authority , it is an excellent book. In a recent blog post , he surprisingly suggests that taxation may in some cases be

The collapse of the American-backed state in Afghanistan brings home the wisdom of Murray Rothbard’s essay “The Death of a State,” written in July 1975. The lessons that Rothbard drew from the fall of South Vietnam apply equally to the present crisis. Among these were the importance of guerilla warfare, the dependence of all states on majority

Roger Crisp is a well-regarded philosopher and has written important books on ethical theory and its history with a concentration on the British utilitarians. But in an article that appeared in the New Statesman on August 10, he presents one of the strangest arguments I’ve ever read. Crisp asks us to imagine that an asteroid is about to hit the

Today is Walter Block’s 80 th birthday. The title of most famous book, Defending the Undefendable , best captures his way of looking at the world. He will take a libertarian principle and deduce consequences from it with iron consistency, often using imaginative examples while doing so.  You may think he is wrong, but you will find it more

Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II by Sean McMeekin Basic Books, 2021 831 pp. Probably the dominant mainstream view of World War II goes like this. World War II was the “good war.” Though Joseph Stalin was guilty of many crimes, Adolf Hitler, with his vast conquests accompanied by mass murder on a colossal scale, was an immediate threat