Philosophy

The philosopher Roger Crisp has asked us to consider the bright side of the wholesale extinction of sentient life: a lot of suffering would be prevented.

What is the modern state? The answer to this question will—and perhaps already has—split the once unified white evangelical voting bloc.

 According to customary analysis, public goods will not be supplied efficiently. But it does not follow that the good will not be supplied at all, or in a quantity insufficient to “do the job.”

Presented at Mises University 2021.

If scarcity is at the root of all conflict, what does that tell us about rights?

Countless Americans have been repeatedly told to “follow the science,” supposedly to prove they are not obstinately closed-minded. But the main purpose of it all was just to open people’s minds to what government bureaucrats wanted. 

Wittgenstein one said, “If people did not sometimes do silly things … nothing intelligent would ever get done.”  This notion is important in understanding the benefits and realities of entrepreneurship and risk taking. 

There's a problem in a discipline when scholars don't realize that a view is controversial and needs to be supported by argument. Deirdre McCloskey is one such scholar. 

Mises was strongly committed to Darwinism, but, he says, the social Darwinists drew the wrong lessons from evolution. The onset of the division of labor changes biological competition into social competition, in which no one is annihilated. 

Countless Americans have been repeatedly told to “follow the science,” supposedly to prove they are not obstinately closed-minded. But the main purpose of it all was just to open people’s minds to what government bureaucrats wanted.