World History

From Theory and History Part Three, “Epistemological Problems of History”. Narrated by John Pruden.

"This is firsthand experience of the truth of Mises's argument against socialism: that without market prices for factors of production, there is no intelligent or rational way to organize society."

Critics condemn economic theory for disregarding the role that power plays in real life.

Dissatisfaction with the Treaty of Versailles, as well as the ravages of the Great Depression, brought Hitler to power in Europe.

But the most effective mechanism ever devised for making effective pooling of our faculties as easy as it can be — the free market — is also the natural result of reducing general laws to a bare minimum and leaving people free to make their own choices about their own values.

Men of influential and privileged status are rarely inclined to toss all their privileges aside to engage in the lonely and dangerous task of worki

Whatever their motives may have been, whatever at any given moment they thought of themselves as doing, Anthony Ashley Cooper and John Locke advanced the libertarian idea, just as John Lilburne did. All three of them are part of the libertarian tradition.

For all these reasons, appealing to a monarch to impose laissez-faire from above can only be a losing strategy.

The bottom line is that trade sanctions create poverty.

"The true end of man — not that which capricious inclination prescribes for him, but that which is prescribed by eternally immutable reason — is the highest and most harmonious cultivation of his faculties into one whole. For this cultivation, freedom is the first and indispensible condition."