It seems needful to remind everybody what liberalism was in the past, that they may perceive its unlikeness to the so-called liberalism of the present. Most people have lost sight of the truth that in past times liberalism habitually stood for individual freedom versus state coercion.
Life in a stateless society will sometimes be bad, because not only are people not angels, but many of them are irredeemably vicious. But the outcome in a society under a state will be much worse.
If we were to award a prize for "brilliancy" in the history of economic thought, it would surely go to Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, the baron de l'Aulne (1727–1781). His career in economics was brief but brilliant and in every way remarkable.
The well-known problem of the tyranny of the majority is present in both corporate/investor democracies and political democracies. What sets one apart from the other are the remedies available to the disgruntled minority.
Under socialism, the costs of one person's decisions are spread equally throughout society, to the point that that individual hardly feels the penalties of his value judgments — short of illness and death.
Libertarians have not come to promise human beings a technocratic utopia; we have come to bring everyone freedom, the freedom of each individual to pursue whatever his or her dreams of the future may be. Or even to have no vision of the future.
Krugman dismissed the idea that Keynesianism was best suited for totalitarianism and he ignored my inquiry about the fact that the mess we are in is precisely because the US government has pursued Keynesian policies for the past eight decades.
It's strange how most people are willing to give the police and the courts the benefit of the doubt and pretend as if the system somehow knows something that we do not know. Anyone hauled off to jail, they believe, probably deserved what is coming to him.
Recorded at the Ludwig von Mises Institute; Auburn, Alabama; 9 October 2010.
