1. Autistic Exchange and Interpersonal Exchange Action always is essentially the exchange of one state of affairs for another state of affairs. If the action is performed by an individual without any reference to cooperation with other individuals, we may call it autistic exchange. An instance: the isolated hunter who kills an animal for his […]
This article is the second in a two-part series. Check out part 1 here. Even though the downhill trajectory we’ve seen over the last decades in terms of property rights is bad enough, nothing could have ever prepared us for what the covid-19 crisis would bring. Even those of us who have read enough history […]
Sweden’s rent control is widely touted by many who don’t understand economics as a model for how a property market should work. Young people in Ireland, for example, like to point to Sweden as a nirvana where rent control ensures easy availability of affordable and high-quality rental stock. I was once told by a young […]
Robert Nozick is probably most familiar to readers of this column as a libertarian political philosopher, but this week I’d like to look at another issue, relevant not only to libertarians but to anyone interested in moral and political thought, which he discusses in his last book, Invariances (Harvard, 2001.) This is whether our beliefs […]
The top seller on Amazon for books devoted to war and peace as of this writing, Scott Horton’s newest offering, Hotter than the Sun: Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, is a timely must read. As Washington barrels heedlessly along into Cold War II, the American public badly needs educating on the current risks, past close calls, […]
There is a renewed interest in the West Indian colonies’ relevance to the British industrial revolution and the subsequent economic transformations that substantially altered Western society’s fortunes. This literature has been provoked by the urge to challenge earlier interpretations that underestimate colonies’ value to Western countries by showing how interconnected global economies were. Colonies were […]
From the Introduction… The American notion [is] that the end of government is liberty, not happiness, or prosperity, or power, or the preservation of an historic inheritance, or the adaptation of national law to national character, or the progress of enlightenment and the promotion of virtue; [and] that the private individual should not feel the […]
I have only recently been exposed to Douglas Wilson, a pastor in Moscow, Idaho, proprietor of both a blog and a YouTube channel named Blog & Mablog. I find him funny and not fearful. He speaks strongly regarding the cultural mess we are in. Not to say I agree with all of his comments, but […]
When Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell defined the paleolibertarian doctrine, they simply wanted to break the clock of social democracy and repeal the twentieth century, during which some of the greatest horrors in history were created from the deranged ideas of power-hungry nineteenth-century intellectuals by applying these ideas with the full might of the state, costing […]
Black entrepreneurship in the United States has a remarkable history. Even during the inhospitable climate of Southern slavery, both enslaved and free blacks managed to establish lucrative ventures. Research on black entrepreneurship has revealed that in the Antebellum South black entrepreneurs’ pursuits spanned the entire gamut of industry, ranging from merchandising to transportation. Indeed, the success of […]
