Men do well under a plan and its controls if the Gestalt to be accomplished makes sense, is not too distant, and offers rewards as well as challenges for different levels of skill. But this is quite different from a superimposed, infallible political philosophy which would urge on us an engineered society.
It is just a bit strange that companies would be, on the one hand, attacked for not providing enough in wages and, on the other, required to not provide any wages.
We've all encountered the rival theories Hunt is talking about here — the thinkers like Max Weber, who believed that the rise of liberalism was caused by the Puritan work ethic, the thinkers who believe that the rise of liberalism was made inevitable by Christian ideas about the individual soul, and so forth.When you're attempting to explain market processes, whether in the marketplace for goods and services or the marketplace of ideas, it's never that simple.
Since states are created and directed by the boundaries of what people will accept as proper, since they exist only in the vacuum created by the public’s tolerance for aggression, the only lasting way to change the state is to persuade the public to rethink the program.
Advertising is not a scam at all. It is individuals sacrificing a level of product perfection in exchange for a level of product trust and time efficiency that cannot be fulfilled through word-of-mouth advertising.
Cowperthwaite, along with many Austrian School economists, has proven that economics is only a dismal science when interventionist economists insist on making it one.
In the Free Market Environmentalism (FME) this can be justified on homesteading grounds: our ancestors exhaled, and left those rights to us.
"A theory that identifies liberty with a single right, the right of doing all that you have the actual power to do, and a theory which secures liberty by certain unalterable rights, and founds it on truths which men did not invent and may not abjure, cannot both be formative principles in the same Constitution."
"What comes out from reading Mises's policy writings is that if you had asked him a fiscal, or monetary, or regulatory-policy question, he would not have said, and did not simply say, 'laissez-faire' — abolish the central bank, deregulate the economy, and eliminate taxes."
