January 2013
2 posts
The Theory Of Money In The Tradition Of Carl...
Carl Menger, Principles of Economics (1871), Chapter VIII - The Theory of Money:
“In the early stages of trade, when economizing individuals are only slowly awakening to knowledge of the economic gains that can be derived from exploitation of existing exchange opportunities, their attention is, in keeping with the simplicity of all cultural beginnings, directed only to the most obvious of...
Libertarians Against Drunk Driving Laws?
Jeffrey Tucker has written an article on the laws and enforcement of driving under the influence of alcohol. He would like to see driving under the influence scrapped as a crime, and believes enforcing rules against reckless driving to be sufficient.
Tucker writes:
“With laws against DUI, what’s being criminalized? Not reckless driving as such. Not aggression against anyone. What’s...
December 2012
3 posts
Intellectual Property For Medicinal Drugs?
Medicinal drugs are often named as an example of where intellectual property protection has an advantage for consumers. For example, in a recent video titled ‘End Software Patents’, Alex Tabarrok says:
“In an industry like pharmaceuticals, patents make sense. It costs about a billion dollars to develop the average new drug. But a generic imitation might cost just 50 cents a pill. If...
Santa Claus: A Tale Of Socialism
My wife was recently told that raising children without the tale of Santa Claus is heartless. The tale is usually presented as reality to trusting young children. What is the tale about?
Santa runs a factory on the North Pole with many ‘happy workers’. He does not partake in the international division of labor. He does not buy from any producers, he does not ship resources from...
For Tom Woods: are rights a human construction or...
In a recent video, Tom Woods brings up secession. He says:
“The question of secession is basically raising this issue: is it possible that the political unit could become so large as to be, even by government standards, dysfunctional?”
[..]
“Why would it be that the number of square feet in the United States is like a heaven-sent number? Like ‘it’s this many...
November 2012
1 post
Jeffrey Herbener and Ralph Raico on Darwinism
In a recent speech titled ‘Legacies of the Great War’, Jeffrey Herbener quoted part of a book review by Ralph Raico:
“Tooley deals deftly with the intellectual and cultural currents of pre-war Europe. Contributing to the proneness to violence were a bastardized Nietzschianism and the anarchosyndicalism of Georges Sorel, but most of all Social Darwinism — really, just Darwinism...
October 2012
2 posts
Rothbard Misunderstood And Misrepresented Mises's...
Murray Rothbard in Praxeology, Value Judgments, and Public Policy (1976):
The case of Mises is particularly interesting, not only because he was a leader in the modern Austrian school and in praxeology, but also because he was, of all the economists in the twentieth century, the most uncompromising and passionate adherent of laissez-faire and at the same time the most rigorous and uncompromising...
Learning How To Think | by AJ
This is a repost of the answer given by AJ to the question: ‘What lessons would you create to teach kids how to think?’.
Learning to thinking clearly is “simply” a matter of unfailingly diligent mental hygiene.
Don’t mix strong emotions with intellectual thinking (this is basic)
Keep your identity small
Identify all the unseen premises
Don’t assume...
September 2012
1 post
Ludwig von Mises on Science and Morality
Ludwig von Mises was a supporter of the (classical) liberal order of society, but he did not try to use science to prove that it was objectively just or good.
Science has to do with existential propositions: with the “is” and the “is not.” It is only with regard to existential propositions that there can be any question of truth versus falsity.
Value judgments, on the...
August 2012
2 posts
David Gordon and the Cash Register Thought...
In ‘What Is Morality? The Ethics of Hazlitt’ (1 June 2012), David Gordon says:
“Suppose, you see an opportunity to steal. Let’s say, you’re in a store and you see the cash register is open and the store owner has just gone to the back, and you can just take the money out.. You have good reasons to think he won’t be able to catch you. So you might say:...
Is The Free Market A Utopia?
Jon Stewart asks:
“If we didn’t have government, we’d all be in hovercrafts, and nobody would have cancer, and broccoli would be ice-cream?”
Libertarians are not against government, they are for economic cooperation. We would like to expand the division of labor in as many areas as possible, and as such we identify government as the main roadblock.
If most people today...
July 2012
1 post
A Critique of Stefan Molyneux's "Consequentialist...
Benjamin Powell (see some of his videos here) says: ‘I think consequentialist arguments are important to address, because most people don’t have the same burning passion that you all do and some of us in the room do, about abolishing the state; which just doesn’t resonate with them, and they’re scared of a world that they don’t know, and [..]’. [direct link]
Stefan...
June 2012
2 posts
How to not come off as a cultist
– Show that your project is part of a larger and much older tradition. There is almost no possibility that your ideology is completely new.
Ideas exhibit evolutionary patterns. We discovered ideas from others, that we combined and tweaked. And they also developed their ideas through discovery, combining, and tweaking.
When you point to that tradition, you are communicating: “I learned from...
Menger versus Mises and Rothbard on how money...
( A reading of this article on Youtube )
Through Hans Sennholz, I was pointed to the appendix of Menger’s Principles of Economics. I didn’t know about the statement he makes there before, so I’m happy to have found it. Note that the following is in complete contradiction to Rothbard (who followed Mises on money):
Adam Muller discusses the desire of men for the state and thinks...
March 2012
1 post
Request For Donation Subscriptions, And A New...
Hello World. My name is Niels van der Linden. I am 31 years of age and from the Netherlands.
I became a libertarian and anarcho-capitalist in 2005. In 2006, I started studying Austrian economics. In 2007, I started posting videos online; which is also the year I created the V for Voluntary symbol.
By now, I have a large library of valuable materials. The two main topics are: economics (how...
February 2012
1 post
A Critique Of Molyneuvian Ethics (‘universally...
Universally Preferable Behaviour — A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, 2007:
“As Hume famously pointed out, it is impossible to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is.’ [..] It is true that if a man does not eat, he will die – we cannot logically derive from that fact a binding principle that he ought to eat. If he wants to live, then he must eat.”
Agreed. Value is subjective.
...
January 2012
2 posts
A Critique Of Hoppean Ethics (‘argumentation...
On the Ultimate Justification of the Ethics of Private Property, -Hans Hoppe. (From: The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, 1993 & 2006. Article reprinted from 1988):
“According to Mises there exists no ultimate justification for ethical propositions in the same sense as there exists one for economic propositions. Economics can inform us whether or not certain means are...
Libertarianism Is Not Based On Christianity
Libertarianism is not based on Christianity. That is to say: there are people who base their libertarianism on their Christianity.. but there are also many people who do not base their libertarianism in religion.
“For a group that doesn’t believe in evolution, it’s awfully Darwinian.” - Jon Stewart, October 27 2011, addressing Andrew Napolitano as a libertarian (“Why is it...
November 2011
20 posts
Rules require a ruler?
Suppose there is an island with 8 people on it, who live together peacefully. Now A arrives on the island who hasn’t yet learned the advantages of voluntary cooperation.
A makes a trade with B: A’s bag of sugar for a pair of primitive shoes from B. After A has left, B finds out that the bag contains mostly sand. B has been defrauded.
A number of consequences ensue:
B writes up...
Price Theory (by LifeIsHowItIs)
There are certain properties that make a good an economic good, or a thing that is able to obtain a price, are
It must exist in scarcity
There must be a human need that the good satisfies
We must have knowledge that it will satisfy that need (oil was for most of human society not an economic good because we lacked the the knowledge/technology to apply it towards use in consumer goods or the...
Economic Coordination and the Business Cycle (by...
The Free Market
A free market is a pattern of voluntary interpersonal exchanges. Free market firms in pursuit of profits produce goods and services that satisfy consumer desires as efficiently as possible given the supply conditions.
The market process is how the structure of production – the way land, labor and capital is used – is rearranged in response to changing supply and demand...
Crusoe, Morality, and Axiomatic Libertarianism
Imagine Robinson Crusoe survives a shipwreck and reaches an island in a rowboat. He discovers the island is full of hungry tigers. He can’t even step foot on the island for he would be attacked.
* Does Robinson have any rights on this island? He does not. In this situation, the concept has no meaning.
Robinson takes off and after a day of rowing he finds another island, where he...
War is good for the economy?
Claim:
“War is good for the economy because it provides jobs and it generates technology.”
Analysis:
Jobs
The purpose of an economy is providing for the satisfaction of consumers.
This means a job is only valuable insofar it improves on the value of resources, as judged by consumers.
Given that the jobs created do not produce consumer goods, or producer goods that...
Why Do We Trade?
Absolute advantage
Imagine there are two persons A and B who produce product X and Y. One is faster at producing product X and one is faster at producing product Y. Assume these are their productivities for a day’s labor, if they produced either product X or product Y:
If they both spent half their day producing product X and half their day producing product Y, their gains would look...
Scientific Research
Innovation and discovery in a free market
In order to make a profit, people offer goods and services in the marketplace. Profits bring in competitors who also like to take a share of the profit. In order to offer different, better or cheaper goods, single entrepreneurs and firms (groups working together in entrepreneurship) invest a portion of their time and profits into technological innovation...
A Better Political Chart
Private property rights
The right of all individuals to keep the wealth they have created, traded for (with goods or with their labor), and received as a gift.
Anarcho-capitalism
It is not right for one person to rule over another person; it hurts society. Use rights (private property) are created through a unique connection between someone’s labor and nature (homesteading). Mutually...
(My Libertarian) Morality, From a Societal...
As human beings, we have needs, which we like to satisfy. Some of those needs can be satisfied through resources, or ‘goods’. If you couldn’t grab those resources from your neighbor, how would you satisfy your needs? You can either make all your own things, or you trade with others. But to sell something you must first use your brain and your body to transform some things from...
What Is Money?
Based on the works of Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Ludwig von Mises
Trade
Before we come to money, the question arises why there is trade in the first place. If we imagine that in the beginning every person was identical to every other person; like a clone. And also that the land and its resources were the same for every individual so that everyone would find a tree in front of him and a lake in...
Minimum wage helps poor people?
Minimum wage helps the poor?
Minimum Wage, Maximum Stupidity (by Peter Schiff)
Claim:
“It is exploitation to pay workers less than a certain amount of hourly wage. Raising their wages by law is fair and helps these workers.”
Analysis:
A firm calculates how much extra profit it makes with each individual worker. If a potential worker can add to the firm’s overall...
How Could A Voluntary Society Function?
Introduction
We start with the premise that the widely shared beliefs in a society are:
Don’t harm other people
Respect their property
That part of nature that you transform and make valuable becomes yours
A violation of these principles is an attempt to live at the expense of others, and cannot be allowed
In a small village this could work in a straight forward manner, where...
Against Owning Information ('intellectual...
People say: “You can’t copy someone else’s idea. That’s stealing.” ..I want to evaluate that statement.
Stealing means you are taking away something from someone, so that they no longer have it. So copying is not theft of any personal property, as that isn’t taken away.
What could next be argued is that copying is the stealing of revenue. In other words,...
History of Thought: Witchcraft and Witchhunts
A witch-hunt is a search for witches or evidence of witchcraft, often involving moral panic, mass hysteria and lynching, but in historical instances also legally sanctioned and involving official witchcraft trials. The classical period of witchhunts in Europe and North America falls into the Early Modern period or about 1480 to 1750, [..], resulting in an estimated 40,000 to 100,000...
Capitalism In One Lesson
Links
“Robinson Crusoe” Economics | Robert P. Murphy
The Division of Labor and Society | Jörg Guido Hülsmann
Direct Exchange and Barter Prices | Robert P. Murphy
Division Of Labor and Money | Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Gold and the Periodic Table of the Elements | Sanat Kumar
Labor Market Myths | Thomas J. DiLorenzo
‘Wage Slavery | Stargazer5781’ is no longer available. Replaced by:...
Innovation in the gaming business model: Humble...
Intellectual property advocates say that the use of information needs to be protected by law. But even in today’s world, where this protection exists, there are commercial developers who are trying business models that are relying less and less on that protection.
The latest example is the Humble Indie Bundle 3. For short periods, they offer a bundle of games with no copy protection, and...
Sports equality?
Despite years of protesting by tennis pioneer Billie Jean King and others, in 2005 the French Open and Wimbledon still refused to pay women’s and men’s players equally through all rounds. In 2005, Williams met with officials from both tournaments, arguing that female tennis players should be paid as much as males. Although WTA tour President Larry Scott commented that she left...
'Off-the-Record' Instant Messaging (Regaining...
Off-the-Record (OTR) Messaging allows you to have private conversations over instant messaging by providing:
Encryption - No one else can read your instant messages.
Authentication - You are assured the correspondent is who you think it is.
Deniability - The messages you send do not have digital signatures that are checkable by a third party. Anyone can forge messages after a conversation to...
Bitcoin, from an Austrian perspective
Don’t Buy Bitcoins (April 22nd, 2011)
Don’t Buy Bitcoins, Part 2 (June 17th, 2011)
Don’t Buy Bitcoins, Part 3 - Why Goods Attain Prices (July 6th, 2011)
The Lew Rockwell Show - Tulip Mania
Peter Schiff on bitcoin:
The Peter Schiff Show: Donald Norman interview, co-founder of Bitcoin Consultancy (June 20th, 2011)
Further comments on bitcoin (June 21st, 2011)
Doug...
The Sudbury Files
These videos will give you a complete understanding of the Sudbury model of learning and its effects. The Sudbury model incorporates unschooling in a setting of mixed aged children, housed in a place with a myriad of resources and possibilities.
Send people to this post if you want to show them what unschooling is like.
Sudbury Valley School
Sudbury Valley School - Focus and Intensity
The...
