As a follow-up to my recent article about F. A. Hayek's classic article "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (1945), I thought it worth extending Hayek's exploration of this area of social theory. In 1968 the Nobel laureate-economist delivered a lecture in German known...
Hayek
TGIF: Ducking Hayek
by Sheldon Richman | May 12, 2023 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
May 8 marked the 124th anniversary of the birth of F. A. Hayek, the 1974 Nobel-winning economist of the Austrian school. (He died in 1992.) That makes it a good time to acknowledge one of his many contributions, his epistemic case for the free and competitive market...
What Democrats Need to Know About War
by Keith Knight | Feb 14, 2023 | Don't Tread on Anyone
https://youtu.be/FllJ0lKnEdg My case for pacifism, to recap, comes down to three simple premises. The first two are empirical: Premise #1: The short-run costs of war are clearly awful. [Empirical claim about immediate effects of war]. Premise #2: The long-run benefits...
TGIF: Where Socialists Go Wrong
by Sheldon Richman | Jan 13, 2023 | Featured Articles, History, Libertarianism, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
Since socialism is "in" today -- even though many people who say they favor it have no idea what it is -- F. A. Hayek's last book, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (1988), is worth checking out. Hayek, the late great Nobel-laureate economist of the Austrian...
Patriots Cannot Be Nationalists
by Jeffrey Wernick | Dec 6, 2022 | Blog
I think George Orwell has explained this very well: “By 'nationalism' I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions and tens of millions of people can be confidently labeled 'good' or...
It’s Time to Retire ‘Classical Liberalism’
by Jeff Deist | Dec 6, 2022 | Featured Articles, Libertarianism
“Today the tenets of this nineteenth-century philosophy of liberalism are almost forgotten. In the United States “liberal” means today a set of ideas and political postulates that in every regard are the opposite of all that liberalism meant to the preceding...
Remembering Rose Wilder Lane
by Timothy Sandefur | Dec 6, 2022 | Featured Articles
It was on this day in 1886 that the journalist and author Rose Wilder Lane was born in a little house on the prairie that she and her mother, Laura Ingalls Wilder, would later make famous. A brilliant, moody, and independent spirit, Rose was eventually to become one...
DHS Bulletin Warns of Dangerous, Anti-Government ‘Extremists’
by Jeffrey Wernick | Dec 2, 2022 | Blog
From a DHS Bulletin dated November 30, 2022: Perceptions of government overreach continue to drive individuals to attempt to commit violence targeting government officials and law enforcement officers. In August 2022, an individual wearing body armor and armed with...
The Squad is Wrong About “Inequality”
by Keith Knight | Oct 7, 2022 | Blog
The rapid economic advance that we have come to expect seems in a large measure to be the result of this inequality and to be impossible without it. Progress at such a fast rate cannot proceed on a uniform front but must take place in echelon fashion... At any...
TGIF: True Liberals Are Not Conservatives
by Sheldon Richman | May 20, 2022 | Economics, Featured Articles, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
The relevance of F. A. Hayek's essay "Why I Am Not a Conservative," the postscript to his important 1960 book, The Constitution of Liberty, is demonstrated at once by the opening quote from Lord Acton: At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its...
Ten Favorite Books
by Sheldon Richman | Feb 25, 2022 | Blog
Keith Knight, host of the Don't Tread on Anyone podcast, interviewed me about ten of my favorite books. Watch it here.
Inflation: An Ontological Reality of Modern Economic Life
by Vibhu Vikramaditya | Feb 21, 2022 | Economics, Featured Articles
The United States of America and economies around the world are suffering from levels of inflation unprecedented in the twenty-first century. While the origins of COVID-19 are debatable, the causes of inflation are not. They lie in undisputed human actions; actions...
Two Under-Appreciated Contributions of the Catholic Church – Thomas E. Woods Jr., Ph.D.
by Keith Knight | Feb 6, 2022 | Don't Tread on Anyone
https://youtu.be/6-5-bOGeYUc Locke may have been and indeed was an ardent Protestant, but he was also a Protestant scholastic, heavily influenced by the founder of Protestant scholasticism, the Dutchman Hugo Grotius, who in turn was heavily influenced by the late...
Reason Has Limits, But What Doesn’t?
by Sheldon Richman | Feb 2, 2022 | Blog
It is not a criticism of reason to acknowledge that no reasoning person or group can have a synoptic view of the world or of society that would enable him or it to rationally plan everything. The faculty of reason is packaged within individual human beings, and no...
Blog
The Non-Existent Difference Between National Socialism and Democratic Socialism
Summary: National Socialism and Democratic Socialism both advocate institutionalized violence by the state against peaceful people only differing in rhetoric. The most popular self described Democratic Socialists in America today are Senator Bernie Sanders and...
A Response to My Memorial Day Critics
My article against Memorial Day drew a lot of ire and attention. This should not have been surprising; I was making a controversial statement. What did surprise me, however, was that many critics were self-described libertarians or former libertarians. There were many...
Ignoring Political Gossip & Sticking to Principle
https://youtu.be/ZwWHjYVY4tg In the private sector, firms must attract voluntary customers or they fail; and if they fail, investors lose their money, and managers and employees lose their jobs. The possibility of failure, therefore, is a powerful incentive to find...
The Myth of “Hyper-Rugged-Isolationist-Individualism”
Myth #1: Libertarians believe that each individual is an isolated, hermetically sealed atom, acting in a vacuum without influencing each other. This is a common charge, but a highly puzzling one. In a lifetime of reading libertarian and classical-liberal...
The Lesson From Germany and Korea
Institutions are, of course, in some sense the products of culture. But, because they formalize a set of norms, institutions are often the things that keep a culture honest, determining how far it is conducive to good behaviour rather than bad. To illustrate the...
Occupational Licensing Increases Prices and Deprives People of Options
When you shop online, vendors usually give you a bunch of different ways to sort your options. Take Amazon: One popular sorting option – especially for customers with low income – is “Price: Low to High.” You’ve probably used it yourself many times. This...
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