Richard Ebeling: The Case For Freedom and Free markets in the writings of Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek and Ayn Rand

Dr. Richard Ebeling, American libertarian author, former president of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and professor of economics, in a recent speech dealt with the works of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek and Ayn Rand as providing for the intellectual and ethical foundations for the case of Freedom and Free markets.  

From Dr. Ebeling at the Northwood University Blog (bold mine)

Three names are widely associated with the cause of human freedom and economic liberty in the 20^thcentury: Friedrich A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Ayn Rand. Indeed, it can be argued that Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) and The Constitution of Liberty (1960), Mises, Socialism ((1936) Human Action(1949), and Rand’s The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957) did more to turn the intellectual tide of opinion away from collectivism in the second half of the twentieth century than any other works that reached out to the informed layman and general public.

Now, in the second decade of the 21st century their enduring influence is seen by the continuing high sales of their books, and the frequency with which all three are referred to in the media and the popular press in the face of the current economic crisis and the concerns about the revival of dangerous statist trends in the United States and other parts of the world.

The Influence of Mises, Hayek, and Rand

In Hayek’s case, his influence has reached inside academia, that bastion of the social engineering mentality in which too many professors, especially in the social sciences, still dream wistfully about society being remade in their own images of “social justice” and political correctness – regardless of the expense in terms of people’s personal and economic liberty.

Hayek’s message of intellectual humility – that there is more to the complexities of the world than any government planning or intervening mind can ever master – has forced some in that academic arena to take seriously the possibility that there may be “limits” to what political paternalism can achieve without undermining the essential institutional foundations of a free and prosperous society.

Mises continues to be recognized as the most original and influential member of the Austrian School of Economics during the greater part of the 20th century. Mises stands out as that unique and original thinker who proved why socialist planning cannot work, that government intervention breeds inescapable distortions and imbalances throughout the market, and how central bank manipulation of money and interest rates sets in motion the booms and busts of the business cycle. The current recession has brought new attention to the Austrian theory of money and economic fluctuations, which was first formulated by Mises in the early decades of the 20th century.

While the academe of philosophers is still not willing to give Ayn Rand the respect and serious attention that others believe she rightly deserves, it is nonetheless true that her novels and non-fiction writings, especially The Virtue of Selfishness (1964) and Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal (1966), continue to capture the interest and imagination of a growing number of students in the halls of higher education in the United States. In other words, her ideas continue to reach out to that potential generation of “new intellectuals” that Rand hoped would emerge to offer a principled and morally grounded defense of individualism and capitalism.

The Common Historical Contexts of Their Time

Hayek, Mises and Rand each made their case for freedom and the political order that accompanies it in their own way. While Mises was born in 1881 and, therefore, was 18 years older than Hayek (who was born in 1899) and nearly a quarter of a century older that Rand (who was born in 1905), there were a number of historical experiences they shared in common, and which clearly helped shape their ideas.

First, they came from a Europe that was deeply shaken by the catastrophic destruction and consequences of the First World War. Both Mises and Hayek saw the horrors of combat and the trauma of military defeat while serving in the Austro-Hungarian Army, as well as experiencing the economic hardships and the threat of socialist revolution in postwar Vienna. Rand lived through the Russian Revolution and Civil War, which ended with the triumph of Lenin’s Bolsheviks and the imposition of a brutal and murderous communist regime; she also experienced “socialism-in-practice” as a student at the University of Petrograd (later Leningrad, now St Petersburg) as the new Marxist order was being imposed on Russian society.

Second, they also experienced the harsh realities of hyperinflation. Rand witnessed the Bolshevik’s intentional destruction of the Russian currency during the Russian Civil War and Lenin’s system of War Communism, which was designed as a conscious attempt to bring about the abolition of the market economy and capitalist “wage-slavery.” In postwar Germany and Austria, Mises and Hayek watched the new socialist-leaning governments in Berlin and Vienna turn the handle of the monetary printing press to fund the welfare statist and interventionist expenditures for instituting their collectivist dreams. In the process, the middle classes of Germany and Austria were decimated and the social fabric of German and Austrian society were radically undermined.

Third, Rand was fortunate enough to escape the living hell of socialism-in-practice in Soviet Russia by being able to come to America in the mid-1920s. But from her new vantage point, she was able to observe the rise and impact of “American-style” collectivism, during the Great Depression and the coming of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s. In Europe, Mises and Hayek watched the rise of fascism in Italy in the 1920s and then the triumph of Hitler and National Socialism in Germany in 1933, the same year that FDR’s New Deal was implemented in the United States. For both Mises and Hayek, the Nazi variation on the collectivist theme not only showed it to be one of the most deadly forms that socialism could take on. It represented, as well, a dark and dangerous “revolt against reason” with the Nazi’s call to the superiority of blood and force over the human mind and rational argumentation.

Their Common Premises on Collectivism and the Free Society

What were among the common premises that Mises, Hayek and Rand shared in the context of the statist reality in which they had lived? Firstly, I would suggest that it clarified conceptual errors and political threats resulting from philosophical and political collectivism. The “nations,” “races,” “peoples” to which the totalitarian collectivists appealed resulted in Mises, Hayek and Rand reminding their readers that these do not exist separate or independent from the individual human beings who make up the membership of these short-hand terms for claimed human associations.  Anything to be understood about such “collectives” of peoples can only realistically and logically begin with an analysis of and an understanding into the nature of the individual human being, and the ideas he may hold about his relationships to others in society.

Furthermore, political collectivism was a dangerous tool in the hands of the ideological demagogues who used the notions of the “people’s will,” or the “nation’s purposes,” or the “society’s needs,” or the “race’s interests,” to assert their claim to a higher insight that justified the right for those with this “special intuitive gift” to guide and rule over others.

Secondly, all three rejected positivism’s denial of the human mind as something real, and as source for knowledge about man and his actions. Mises and Rand, especially, emphasized the importance of man’s use of his reasoning ability to understand and master the world in which he lived, and the importance of reasoned reflection for conceiving rational rules and institutions for a peaceful and prosperous society of free men.  Mises and Rand considered the entire political trend of the 20thcentury to be in the direction of a “revolt against reason.”

Even Hayek, who is sometimes classified as an “anti-rationalist” due to his emphasis on the limits of human reason for designing or intentionally constructing the institutions of society, should also be classified as an advocate of man’s proper use of his reasoning powers when reflecting on man and society. While the phrasing of his arguments sometimes created this confusion, in various places Hayek went out of his way to insist that he was never challenging the centrality of man’s reasoning and rational faculty. Rather, he was reminding central planners and social engineers that one of the important uses of man’s reasoning ability is to understand the limits of what man can and cannot know or hope to do in terms of trying to remake society according to some preconceived design.

Thirdly, all three firmly believed that there was no societal arrangement conceivable for free men and human betterment other than free market capitalism. Only a private property order that respects and protects the right of the individual to his life, liberty, and honestly acquired possessions give people control over their own lives. Only the voluntary associative arrangements of the marketplace minimize the use of force in human relationships. Only the market economy allows each individual the institutional means of being free from the power of the government and its historical patterns of plunder and abuse. And only the market economy gives each individual the latitude to live for himself and use his knowledge and abilities to further his own ends as he best sees fit.

And, finally, Mises, Hayek, and Rand all emphasized the importance of the intellectuals in society in influencing the tone and direction of political, economic, and social ideas and trends. These “second-hand” thinkers of ideas were the driving force behind the emerging and then triumphing collectivist ideas of the 19th and 20th centuries. They were the molders of public opinion who have served as the propagandizers and rationalizers for the concentration of political power and the enslavement and deaths of hundreds of millions of people – people who were indoctrinated about the need for their selfless obedience and sacrifice to those in political power for a “greater good” in the name of some faraway utopia.

The Consequentialist Rationale for Freedom

But where they differed was on the philosophical justification for the free society and the rights of individuals within the social order. Both Mises and Hayek were what today might go under the term “rule utilitarians.” Any action, policy or institution must be evaluated and judged on the basis of its “positive” or “negative” consequences for the achievement of human ends.

However, the benchmark for such evaluation and judgment is not the immediate “positive” or “negative” effects from any action or policy. It must, instead, be placed into a longer-run context of theoretical insight and historical experience to determine whether or not the policy or action and its effects are consistent with the sustainability of the overall institutional order that is judged to be most effective in furthering the long-run possible goals and purposes of the members of society, as a whole.

Thus, the rule utilitarian is concerned with the “moral hazard” arising from an action or policy implemented. That is, will it create “perverse incentives” that results in members of society acting in ways inconsistent with the long-run betterment of their circumstances?

Welfare payments may not only involve a transfer of wealth from the productive “Peters” in society to the unproductive “Pauls.” It may also reduce the motives of the productive members of society to work, save and invest as much as they had or might, due to the disincentive created by the higher taxes to pay for the redistribution. At the same time, such wealth transfers may generate an “entitlement” mentality of having a right to income and wealth without working honestly to earn it. Thus, the “work ethic” is weakened, and a growing number in society may become welfare dependents living off the honest labor of others through the paternalistic transfer hands of the State.

The net effect possibly is to make the society poorer than it otherwise might have been, and therefore making everyone potentially worse off in terms of the longer-run consequences of such policies.

Read the rest here.

I would add the great Murray Rothbard, but contra rule utilitarians Mr. Rothbard was a champion of natural rights based libertarianism

Quote of the Day: Libertarianism: Putting Justice, Truth, Goodness and Beauty into Reality

Libertarianism is not merely the intellectual contemplation of a wonderful, true and just political philosophy, it's not just the esthetic contemplation of a beautiful ideal, the ideal of a world without organized aggression, a world of harmony, of freedom, of prosperity, of mutual cooperation through voluntary activities in free markets. It is, of course, all of that. Because we become Libertarians in the first place because we fall in love, so to speak, with the goodness, the truth and the beauty of Libertarianism. But we Libertarians, it seems to me, are not content with contemplating justice, with contemplating truth, goodness and beauty. We're not playing intellectual games. We mean to change the world. We want to put this thing into reality.

This snippet from a talk given by "Mr. Libertarian", Dr. Murray N. Rothbard at the First World Libertarian convention in 1982

I posted earlier the video "The Six stages of the Libertarian movement" here.

Pls read the rest of the transcript at the lewrockwell.com

Video: Murray Rothbard on the Six Stages of the Libertarian Movement

(hat tip Lew Rockwell Blog)

Quote of the Day: Distinguishing Property from Wealth

Property is a legal concept, whereas wealth is an economic concept. The two are often confused, but they should be kept quite clearly distinct. The one refers to a set of rights, the other to how people value such rights. The same legal claim to property may yield great wealth today and none tomorrow. Market exchanges change the values of property claims continuously, as Ludwig Lachmann explained clearly in his important essay on “The Market Economy and the Distribution of Wealth.”

This is from Cato Institute’s Tom G. Palmer, in the continuing debate over negative and positive rights at the Cato Unbound

Quote of the Day: Free Migration would be Great for the World

If First World governments simply respected everyone’s right to accept job offers from willing employers, most of the world’s poor wouldn’t need charity. They could take care of themselves. Any able-bodied person living in poverty would be free to sell his labor to the highest bidder in the world. Instead of paying years of income to coyotes, the global poor could migrate for the cost of a bus or boat ticket. Instead of crossing the border in fear to compete for illegal jobs, the global poor could cross the border openly to compete for any job they’re qualified to do.

Wouldn’t this simply drive First World wages down to Third World levels? No. Basic economics tells us that trade barriers don’t just redistribute wealth; they destroy wealth. Confining able-bodied workers to the Third World is like confining agriculture to Antarctica. Standard economic estimates say that open borders would roughly double world output. While trade liberalization never benefits absolutely everyone, free migration would be great for the world and great for the world’s poor.

(italics original)

This is from Professor Bryan Caplan in a debate over “negative and positive rights” at the Cato Unbound

Remembering Murray Rothbard on his 87th Birthday

The great dean of the Austrian school of economics and “Mr. Libertarian”, Murray N. Rothbard (March 2, 1926-January 7, 1995)

Civilization and human existence are at stake, and to preserve and expand it, high theory and scholarship, though important, is not enough. Especially in an age of galloping statism, the classical liberal, the advocate of the free market, has an obligation to carry the struggle to all levels of society, to government, to the general public, to political parties.

Quoted from Mises and the Role of the Economist in Public Policy

Find the list of his works here 

Lawrence Reed’s 10 Rules of Advancing Liberty

President of Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) Lawrence W. Reed offers his 10 Rules of Thumb for advancing the cause of liberty

As indispensable as liberty is to the progress of humanity, its future is never assured. Indeed, on most fronts, freedom has been in retreat for years—its light flickering against the winds of ignorance, irresponsibility, short-term gratification, and power lust. That’s why it’s all the more important that those of us who believe in liberty become more effective spokespersons. 

The Rules of Thumb

Toward that end, I offer the well-worn “top ten” list. These rules of thumb do not appear in any particular order. So I leave it to you, Dear Reader, to decide which ones are more important. (Because it’s not meant to be a final word on the matter, I also invite readers to add to the list.)

1. Get motivated. Liberty is more than a happy circumstance. It’s a moral imperative, worthy of every ounce of passion that good people can muster. It’s not just about getting keyed up in an election year, or responding to some issue of the day. It’s always the difference between choice and coercion, between living your life or others living it for you (and at your expense). If liberty is lost, it may never be restored in your time or in that of your children and grandchildren. For solving problems, avoiding conflict, and bringing people together, there’s no worse course than politics and force, and no better path than liberty for peaceful exchange and cooperation to flourish.

2. Learn. More precisely, never stop learning! To be an effective persuader, there’s no good substitute for commanding the facts and the foundations. Know our ideas backwards and forwards. You can never read or listen to too much economics, history, or philosophy to be the best persuader in your neighborhood. Let the other side talk in bumper stickers. Come armed with substance as opposed to slogans.

3. Be optimistic. It’s tiring and disheartening to hear the defeatists talk like this: “It’s over. The Republic is lost. There’s no turning back. Our goose is cooked. I’m leaving the country.” What’s the point of such talk? It certainly can’t be to inspire. Pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Pessimists only disarm themselves and dispirit others; there’s nothing to be won by it. If you truly believe all is lost, the best thing to do is defer to the possibility that you may be wrong and let the optimists lead the way. (That means leaving pessimism at the door.)

4. Use humor. Even serious business needs moments of levity. Seasoning your case with humor can make it more appealing, more human. If you can’t smile when you’re making the case for liberty—if you can’t evoke a smile or a chuckle from the person you’re talking to—then you’re on the way to losing the battle. Humor breaks the ice.

5. Raise questions. You don’t have to lecture every potential convert. Learn to deploy the Socratic method, especially when you’re conversing with a rigid statist ideologue. Most of the time, such people hold the views they do not because they’re well acquainted with libertarian thought and have rejected it, but because they just don’t know our side. A skilled line of questioning can often prompt a person to think about their premises in ways they never have before.

6. Show you care. It’s been said that people don’t care what you know if they don’t know that you care. Focus on real people when you argue for liberty. Laws and policies inimical to liberty produce so much more than bad numbers; they crush the dreams of real people who want to improve their lives and the lives of those they love. Cite examples of people and what happened to them when government got in the way of their progress. That said, don’t dwell on the negative. Be just as generous in citing examples of what specific people have accomplished when they’ve been given the freedom to try.

7. Seize the moral high ground. Liberty is the one socioeconomic arrangement that demands high standards of moral character. It cannot survive if people are widely dishonest, impatient, arrogant, irresponsible, short-term focused, and disrespectful of the lives, rights and property of others. This truth speaks volumes about the moral superiority of liberty over all other “systems.” Humanity is composed of unique individuals; it is not an amorphous, collective lump to be pushed around by elitists who fancy themselves our masters and planners. Any arrangement that purées our distinct lives in a collectivist blender is a moral offense. Use this argument to strike at the very heart of any opponent’s case.

8. Develop an appealing persona. A libertarian who knows all the facts and theories can still be repulsive and ineffective if he’s condescending, vengeful, coarse or crude, self-righteous, or often in “attack” mode. This is why Dale Carnegie’s classic, How To Win Friends And Influence People, should be on every libertarian’s “must-read” list. Do you want to change the world or just beat your breast? Talk to others or talk to yourself?

And slow down on the negativity! Some libertarians only talk about bad news. These are the folks who see nothing good happening anywhere. This attitude comes across as if they’re telling you, “Stop having fun. The only good news is that there isn’t any. If you think there is good news, we’ll tell you why it isn’t.” This attitude wears badly and rarely wins converts. Heroes and heroic stories are all around us; don’t ignore them by dwelling on the scoundrels and the disappointments.

9. Don’t demand total and immediate acceptance. Have you ever run into a libertarian who lets you know that unless you fully confess all your intellectual sins and repent on the spot, you’re a pariah? The history of progress in ideas provides few examples of wrong-on-everything transforming into right-on-everything in a momentary leap. We must be patient, inviting, and understanding. Know when the cracks are appearing in an opponent’s wall and give him room to tear it down himself. Remember that all of us hold views today that we didn’t accept in our past. None of us came out of the womb with a copy of The Road to Serfdom in our hands.

10. Make allies, not enemies. A handful of cloistered, ineffective—but noisy—libertarians fancy themselves keepers of the faith. They behave as though the greater enemy is not those who embrace no libertarian precepts at all, but rather those who embrace many, but not all, libertarian precepts. So when they find a fellow libertarian who once held different views, or departs from orthodoxy on an issue or two, they start to vilify him. It makes them feel good, but works against the larger cause. If we say we want to make the world a better, more libertarian place, we can’t make it painful for anyone to move in the right direction.

While Mr. Reed’s guidelines are ideal, it’s hard not to ruffle emotional feathers especially when dealing with entrenched political and economic beliefs. For instance, a big factor in Facebook "unfriends" have been due to politics.

Following the above will actually depend on one’s personality, depth of knowledge on liberty (philosophical, political or economics) and one's tolerance levels to emotionally charged objections. 

Nonetheless, education of the truth is the only way to uphold and preach the cause of liberty. The difference lies on the medium or the delivery of the message.

To quote Ordoliberalist (German variant of Neoliberalism) Wilhelm Ropke (source Café Hayek’s Don Boudreaux)

The true task of economics appears to me to be quite different, especially in a modern mass democracy.  Its unglamorous but all the more useful mission is to make the logic of things heard in the midst of the passions and interests of public life, to bring to light inconvenient facts and relationships, to weigh everything and assign it due place, to prick bubbles and expose illusions and confusions, and to counter political enthusiasm and its possible aberrations with economic reason and demagogy with truth.

Remembering H.L. Mencken

Yesterday was the 57th death anniversary of the great libertarian and one of the prolific writers of his time Henry Louis “HL” Mencken.(hat tip Mises blog)

In memory of Mr. Mencken, this stirring quote from his book Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure."

Robert Higgs: Strategy for Winning People Over to Libertarianism

Austrian economist Robert Higgs at the Independent Institute articulates on how the ideals of libertarianism can be won through the premises of consequentialism (utilitarian) and deontology (ethics) 

[bold mine, italics original]

In any event, after the more recent decades of my libertarian journey, I am now struck by a different aspect of this longstanding debate, which has to do with our strategy for winning people over to libertarianism. Strategy 1 is to persuade them that freedom works, that a free society will be richer and otherwise better off than an unfree society; that a free market will, as it were, cause the trains to run on time better than a government bureaucracy will do so. Strategy 2 is to persuade people that no one, not even a government functionary, has a just right to interfere with innocent people’s freedom of action; that none of us was born with a saddle on his back to accommodate someone else’s riding him.

In our world, so many people have been confused or misled by faulty claims about morality and justice that most libertarians, especially in the think tanks and other organizations that carry much of the burden of education about libertarianism, concentrate their efforts on pursuing Strategy 1 as effectively as possible. Hence, they produce policy studies galore, each showing how the government has fouled up a market or another situation by its ostensibly well-intentioned laws and regulations. Of course, the 98 percent or more of society (especially in its political aspect) that in one way or another opposes perfect freedom responds with policy studies of its own, each showing why an alleged “market failure,” “social injustice,” or other problem warrants the government’s interference with people’s freedom of action and each promising to remedy the perceived evils. Anyone who pays attention to policy debates is familiar with the ensuing, never-ending war of the wonks. I myself have done a fair amount of such work, so I am not condemning it. As one continues to expose the defects of anti-freedom arguments and the failures of government efforts to “solve” a host of problems, one hopes that someone will be persuaded and become willing to give freedom a chance.

Nevertheless, precisely because the war of the wonks—not to mention the professors, pundits, columnists, political hacks, and intellectual hired guns—is never-ending, one can never rest assured that once a person has been persuaded that freedom works better, at least in regard to situation X, that person has been won over to libertarianism permanently. If a person has come over only because of evidence and argument adduced yesterday by a pro-freedom wonk, he may just as easily go back to his support for government intervention tomorrow on the basis of evidence and argument adduced by an anti-freedom wonk. As John Maynard Keynes once cleverly replied to someone who asked him about his fluctuating views, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” If libertarians choose to fight for freedom solely on consequentialist grounds, they will be at war forever. Although one may accept this prospect on the grounds that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” this kind of war is deeply discouraging, given that the anti-freedom forces with which libertarians must contend possess hundreds of times more troops and thousands of times more money for purchasing munitions.

In contrast, once the libertarian has persuaded someone that government interference is wrong, at least in a certain realm, if not across the board, there is a much smaller probability of that convert’s backsliding into his former support for government’s coercive measures against innocent people. Libertarianism grounded on the moral rock will prove much stronger and longer-lasting than libertarianism grounded on the shifting sands of consequentialist arguments, which of necessity are only as compelling as today’s arguments and evidence make them. Hence, if we desire to enlarge the libertarian ranks, we are well advised to make moral arguments at least a part of our efforts. It will not hurt, of course, to show people that freedom really does work better than state control. But to confine our efforts to wonkism dooms them to transitory success, at best.

If we are ever to attain a free society, we must persuade a great many of our fellows that it is simply wrong for any individuals or groups, by violence or the threat thereof, to impose their demands on others who have committed no crime and violated no one’s just rights, and that it is just as wrong for the persons who compose the state to do so as it is for you and me. In the past, the great victories for liberty flowed from precisely such an approach—for example, in the anti-slavery campaign, in the fight against the Corn Laws (which restricted Great Britain’s free trade in grains), and in the struggle to abolish legal restrictions on women’s rights to work, own property, and otherwise conduct themselves as freely as men. At the very least, libertarians should never concede the moral high ground to those who insist on coercively interfering with freedom: the burden of proof should always rest on those who seek to bring violence to bear against innocent people, not on those of us who want simply to be left alone to live our lives as we think best, always respecting the same right for others.

Mr. Higg’s proposition of libertarians making “moral arguments at least a part of our efforts” has been the bedrock of my “policy analysis” which some have mistakenly construed as being partisan.  

For clarity purposes, libertarianism is a cause to advance a free “non-aggression based” society and not to promote superficial and delusory "personality based politics" predicated on the principles of aggression.

Ron Paul’s Suggested Book Read List

Retired US Congressman Mr. Ron Paul recommends some 50 books that expounds on the ideas of Freedom. You may want to consider them (some of them are available online via pdf) 

From LewRockwell.com

In Ron Paul's latest best-seller, Liberty Defined: 50 Essential Issues That Affect Our Freedom, he offers us his thoughts on a series of controversial topics, from Abortion to Zionism. His purpose is to inspire serious, critical, and independent thinking. Here are the books he cites for further study. Read 1, 2, or more:

Anderson, Terry. Free Market Environmentalism

Belfield, Richard. The Assassination Business: A History of State-Sponsored Murder

Burleigh, Anne Husted. Education in a Free Society

Caplan, Bryan. The Myth of the Rational Voter

Carter, Jimmy. Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid

Chodorov, Frank. The Income Tax: The Root of All Evil

De Jouvenal, Bertrand. The Ethics of Redistribution

Denson, John. A Century of War

___ Reassessing the Presidency:The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom

Epstein, Richard. Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination

___ Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain

Faddis, Charles S. Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA

Fisher, Louis. Presidential War Power

Fridson, Martin. Unwarranted Intrusions: The Case Against Government Interventions in the Marketplace

Flynn, John T. As We Go Marching

___ The Roosevelt Myth

Grant, James. Money of the Mind

Higgs, Robert. Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government

___ Depression, War and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy

Hoppe, Hans-Hermann. Democracy: The God That Failed

Horner, Christopher. The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming

King, Martin Luther, Jr. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King

La Boétie, Etienne de. The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude

Larson, Edward J. The Creation-Evolution Debate: Historical Perspectives

Lott, John. More Guns, Less Crime

Mann, Vivian. Convivencia: Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Medieval Spain

Mencken, H. L. Notes on Democracy

Mises, Ludwig Von. Human Action: The Scholars Edition

___ The Theory of Money and Credit

___ Omnipotent Government

___ Nation, State and Economy

___ Theory and History

Morley, Felix. Freedom and Federalism

Napolitano, Andrew. The Constitution in Exile: How the Federal Government Has Seized Power by Rewriting the Supreme Law of the Land

Paterson, Isabel. The God of the Machine

Paul, Ron. Mises and Austrian Economics: A Personal View

___ The Case for Gold

___ A Foreign Policy of Freedom

Petro, Sylvester. The Labor Policy of a Free Society

Rockwell, Llewellyn H., Jr. The Left, the Right, and the State

Rothbard, Murray. An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought

___ For a New Liberty

___ Education: Free and Compulsory

Saenz-Baillos, Angel. A History of the Hebrew Language

Savage, Charlie. Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy

Schoeck, Helmut. Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior

Slezkine, Yuri. The Jewish Century

Spooner, Lysander. Let's Abolish Government

Sowell, Thomas. Race and Culture

Thompson, C. Bradley. Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea

Thornton, Mark. The Economics of Prohibition

Thoreau, Henry David, Civil Disobedience

Weiner, Tim. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

West, E. G. Education and the State: A Study in Political Economy

Woods, Thomas. Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked and Government Bailouts Will Make Thing Worse

___ Nullification: How to Resist Tyranny in the 21st Century

Libertarians are Thinkers, Not Feelers

Our adapted political ideology have not only been shaped by our life’s circumstances, orientation and other influences but importantly from our personality.

And from the psychological framework, libertarians are said to be thinkers and not impulsive and emotional chumps.

That’s according to a study cited by the prolific author Matthew Ridley at the Wall Street Journal

The study collated the results of 16 personality surveys and experiments completed by nearly 12,000 self-identified libertarians who visited YourMorals.org. The researchers compared the libertarians to tens of thousands of self-identified liberals and conservatives. It was hardly surprising that the team found that libertarians strongly value liberty, especially the "negative liberty" of freedom from interference by others. Given the philosophy of their heroes, from John Locke and John Stuart Mill to Ayn Rand and Ron Paul, it also comes as no surprise that libertarians are also individualistic, stressing the right and the need for people to stand on their own two feet, rather than the duty of others, or government, to care for people.

Perhaps more intriguingly, when libertarians reacted to moral dilemmas and in other tests, they displayed less emotion, less empathy and less disgust than either conservatives or liberals. They appeared to use "cold" calculation to reach utilitarian conclusions about whether (for instance) to save lives by sacrificing fewer lives. They reached correct, rather than intuitive, answers to math and logic problems, and they enjoyed "effortful and thoughtful cognitive tasks" more than others do.

The researchers found that libertarians had the most "masculine" psychological profile, while liberals had the most feminine, and these results held up even when they examined each gender separately, which "may explain why libertarianism appeals to men more than women."

All Americans value liberty, but libertarians seem to value it more. For social conservatives, liberty is often a means to the end of rolling back the welfare state, with its lax morals and redistributive taxation, so liberty can be infringed in the bedroom. For liberals, liberty is a way to extend rights to groups perceived to be oppressed, so liberty can be infringed in the boardroom. But for libertarians, liberty is an end in itself, trumping all other moral values.

Just a clarification: libertarianism is a political theory which according to Mr. Libertarian, Murray N. Rothbard is “an important subset of moral theory that deals with the proper role of violence in social life” and that while libertarians agree with Lord Acton "liberty is the highest political end", it is “not necessarily the highest end on everyone's personal scale of values”.  

In short, in terms of politics yes "liberty is an end", but politics is just one of the many aspects of a person’s life.

Quote of the Day: The Benefit of Not Voting

we do have the freedom not to vote. No one has yet drafted us into the voting booth. I suggest that we exercise this right not to participate. It is one of the few rights we have left. Nonparticipation sends a message that we no longer believe in the racket they have cooked up for us, and we want no part of it.

You might say that this is ineffective. But what effect does voting have? It gives them what they need most: a mandate. Nonparticipation helps deny that to them. It makes them, just on the margin, a bit more fearful that they are ruling us without our consent. This is all to the good. The government should fear the people. Not voting is a good beginning toward instilling that fear

This is from Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. founder and chairman of the Mises Institute, at the LewRockwell.com

Quote of the Day: People's Access to State Power Results in Persecution

Basically, I contend that contrary to "religion" being responsible for the Crusades, the Inquisition, the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, the treason against the Waldensians, the purges in England, and the oppression in Geneva, to name but a few, it was the fact that these religious positions held a controlling interest in the State that resulted in the terror exacted upon innocents. For instance, Lutheran segregation in post-Luther Germany was a result of the marriage of church and State in that country, the oppression in England of differing religious positions was because of the involvement of the State in religion, Calvin's oppression was because his religion WAS the State, and, most egregiously, the Vatican itself IS a State, to which over a billion souls worldwide pledge (unwittingly, in most cases) their allegiance, even before their own home countries.

Thus, while religionists have played a significant role in the history of the world, it's always those people's access to State power that results in persecution. For instance, you'll never hear of Baptists, Quakers, or Amish oppressing other religions, as these groups (I am a Baptist) have never sought to control the political reins of any region or State. In fact, Rhode Island's charter was premised on the Baptistic doctrine of Soul Liberty, a Biblical principle that I would suggest is the foundation for the concepts of Liberty as taught by John Locke and his intellectual descendants.

(bold emphasis added)

This is from a comment by Vince LaRue at the lewrockwell blog, in reply to Professor Walter Block’s article on Religion and Libertarianism.

Classical Liberal and Libertarian Legacies: Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard

The classical liberal and libertarian legacies of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard in the account of Professor Gary North (at the LewRockwell.com)

Ludwig von Mises

My only meeting with Mises came in the fall of 1971. I had been hired by the Foundation for Economic Education. I was invited to attend a special ceremony. F. A. Harper had edited a second collection of essays honoring Mises. The first book of essays honoring Mises had been edited by Mary Sennholz and was published in 1956. The meeting was held in a nice hotel in New York City. After the meeting, I was able to talk with Mises about a number of things, including his connection with the German sociologist, Max Weber. Weber referred to Mises's 1920 essay on Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, in a footnote in a book that Weber did not complete. He died in 1920. Mises told me he had sent the essay to Weber.

Mises left a legacy that has steadily grown since his death in 1973. He was one of those rare men who had two phases in his career. The first phase, beginning in 1912 and ending after the publication of John Maynard Keynes's General Theory (1936), established his reputation as a major economic theorist. His 1912 book on money and banking, his 1922 book on socialism, and his many articles on specialized topics in economic theory identified him as a major theorist. But his opposition to all forms of fiat money gained him a reputation as a 19th-century Neanderthal in the world of fiat currencies, which began with the abolition of the gold standard at the outbreak of World War I in 1914. His hostility to socialism also contributed to his status as a pariah. He was clearly resisting what was regarded in academic circles as the wave of the future. Academics want to be trendy. Mises was not trendy.

The triumph of Keynesianism after 1936, coupled with the outbreak of World War II in 1939, led to an eclipse in Mises's career. When he came to the United States in 1940 as a refugee, he was virtually unknown here. He had no teaching position. He was 59 years old. He had never been known in the United States. He was dependent on occasional writing assignments, and also on donations from friends, including Henry Hazlitt.

He served as a free market voice crying in the Keynesian wilderness for the next 30 years. He presided over a graduate seminar at New York University which went on for a quarter-century. Murray Rothbard was one of the regular attendees, although as an auditor. He was not paid by the university, which relegated him to the status of visiting professor. He was supported by donors. Yet there was no one on the NYU economics faculty who is remembered today. They were nonentities, and they left no legacy.

The publication of his book, Human Action, by Yale University Press in 1949 did begin to establish his reputation in America. The book sold far better than anyone had expected. This book was the first comprehensive, integrated theory of free market economics that had ever been published. Very few people understood this in 1949, but anyone who has studied the history of economic thought finds in this book the first comprehensive application of economic theory to the entire market-based economy. The analysis is integrated in terms of the Austrian economic defense of subjective value theory and methodological individualism.

He continued to write after 1949. His books were sold by the Foundation for Economic Education, which brought him to the attention of readers who were in favor of the free market. His articles appeared in the Foundation's magazine, The Freeman. The Freeman did not circulate widely in academic circles, but it was a widely read magazine on the Right.

I bought a copy of Human Action in 1960. I was aware of Mises's importance in the history of economic thought, but at my university, I was probably the only student who knew about him. I suspect that the only professor who knew about him was Carl Uhr, who taught a course in the history of economic thought.

Mises was tenacious in his commitment to free-market principles. Probably more than any other major scholar of the 20th century, he was known to his peers as uncompromising. He was regarded as ideological by Chicago school economists. They were correct. Because of his consistency in applying the principle of nonintervention into every nook and cranny of the economy, but above all in his opposition to central banking, free-market economists regarded him as eccentric. "Eccentric" for them was a word for "rigorously consistent."

He was known to the Left as the West's most implacable opponent of economic intervention. When the Nazis marched into Austria in 1938, they confiscated his library. He had left it behind when he left the country to go to Switzerland in 1934. He feared that the Nazis would take over in Austria, and he was correct. As a free market economist and a Jew, he would not have survived in Austria.

The Soviets also recognized who he was, and they confiscated the library from the Nazis, and sent it to Moscow. It was not discovered there by any Western economist until the 1980s. That was a great irony: Western economists did not know who he was, but Soviet economists did. This became increasingly true in the 1980s, as the Soviet economy began to disintegrate, exactly as Mises had predicted it would.

Mises's great advantage over almost all of his peers was this: he wrote in English as a second language. Most economists write in English as a third or fourth language. He did not use equations. He did not use a lot of jargon. He developed paragraphs based on sentences that were developed consecutively. You could begin on page 1 of any of his books and, if you paid attention, you could get to the end without becoming confused.

This was an advantage because average people who were interested in economics could follow his logic. His reputation spread by way of "The Freeman" throughout the late 1950s and the 1960s. That magazine had a circulation as high as 40,000 in some years. There were not many economists who could reach an audience that large.

He really did stick to his knitting, and he really did stick to his guns. He stuck to his guns with such tenacity that for decades he had no influence whatsoever in the academic community. They wrote him off. But, after his death in 1973, his influence began to grow. In 1974, his disciple F. A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize in economics. Bit by bit, his reputation spread. Because of the Mises Institute, his name is now more widely known than almost any other economist of his generation, either before World War I or after World War II. The average person would be unfamiliar with the name of most economists in the first half of the 20th century, and he would be unable to read the works of almost any economist in the second half.

So, because Mises was unwilling to compromise, especially in the area of methodology, refusing to use equations, his legacy has been greater than most of his long-dead peers. His legacy is growing, and theirs is almost nonexistent.

Murray Rothbard

Much of Mises's influence is the result of Murray Rothbard's voluminous writings, in powerful, captivating, and flawless English, from the late 1950s until his death in 1995. Rothbard became the primary interpreter of the works of Mises, even though he did not share Mises's commitment to 19th-century limited government. It is possible to read Human Action, but it is a lot easier to read Man, Economy, and State. Rothbard never found full-time employment in a college or university that had an economics department until late in his career. He taught engineering students, who were not interested in economics and surely did not know who Rothbard was. If he had any legacy from his classes at Brooklyn Polytechnic, nobody has been able to discover it.

He gained his reputation as an economist mainly through the publications that appeared in a 12-month period from 1962 through early 1963. Columbia University Press published his doctoral dissertation on America's first depression: The Panic of 1819. It read like a dissertation, unlike anything else Rothbard ever wrote. It had some minor influence in the economic history, but it was a narrow topic.

Then came Man, Economy, and State in the fall of 1962. Then, the following spring, came America's Great Depression. That book was a study of the statist policies of the Hoover Administration. It applied the Austrian theory of the trade cycle to the economic and political events of the Hoover Administration. Because it was based on Austrian economic theory, academic economists rejected it. Because it was hostile to Herbert Hoover, any conservative who found out about it probably rejected it before even looking at the table of contents. It was almost a perfect book for alienating everybody. Then came the acceleration of the Vietnam War and the development of the antiwar movement. Rothbard became actively involved in the antiwar movement, and he ceased writing books on economic theory. This continued until the early 1980s, when he wrote the best upper division textbook in money and banking that has ever been written, and which has probably never been assigned in any university in the United States: The Mystery of Banking. It is totally hostile to fractional reserve banking, central banking, and all forms of fiat money. It is the primary task of all university-level courses in money and banking to establish the students' confidence in all three of these. Rothbard once again had painted himself into a corner.

Only at the very end of his life did he begin to do a detailed academic study in economics. He wrote two volumes on the history of economic thought. He died before the third volume was completed. There has never been any history of economic thought to rival it in terms of a mixture of minute details of the lives of economists, coupled with careful analyses of their economic doctrines.

His legacy stems from the power of his economic analysis and the cogency of his writing style.

He left another legacy in the area of early American history: his study of colonial America up to, but not including, the American Revolution. Sadly, he took his notes on a piece of audio recording technology that disappeared, so he was never able to finish the fifth volume.

Then there is his legacy as the most literate defender of economic and political anarchism in the history of anarchist thought.

He stuck to his knitting. He never stopped writing. He did not compromise in his hostility to economic intervention by the state. He did short articles, midsized articles, fat books, heavily footnoted books, pamphlets, newsletter articles, movie reviews, political analysis, and whatever else interested him, which was everything except possibly nuclear physics. The huge volume of his writings, the clarity of his writings, the ideological consistency of his writings, and the fact that he got Lew Rockwell on his side, established a legacy which has been leveraged by the power of the World Wide Web. He is reaching a larger audience today than he could have imagined. He died in 1995, the year that the Netscape browser was introduced. He could not have foreseen the impact of this event.

His skills were ideally suited to this new technology. His skills in written communication are exactly what people doing Web searches are looking for. He was a print-media person, and while the Web is equally geared to video, for those who are looking for cogent writing, Rothbard's body of material is vast.

Libertarian Legacies of Henry Hazlitt and Leonard Read…

…in the account of Professor Gary North at the lewrockwell.com

Henry Hazlitt…

Like so many people who came to an understanding of the free market in the 1950s and 1960s, Henry Hazlitt was an influential figure. He had been an influential figure for at least 30 years. He is most famous for his book, Economics in One Lesson, which he wrote in 1946. But he was a New York Times columnist at the time he wrote that book. H. L. Mencken once said that Hazlitt was the only economist who knew how to write.

Hazlitt never went to college. He wrote his first book, Thinking as a Science, when he was 20 years old. That was the same year that he went to work for the Wall Street Journal. That was in 1915. To say that Hazlitt had a long writing career does not begin to convey just how long it was. His final article was published in 1988. He died in 1993 at the age of 98.

I did not meet him until I went to work for the Foundation for Economic Education in 1971. But I had been reading his materials ever since the late 1950s. I was a latecomer in this process. It is safe to say that anyone who called himself a libertarian in 1960 had been influenced, directly or indirectly, by Hazlitt. I suspect that this is still true.

Hazlitt was one of the early American promoters of the writings of Ludwig von Mises. He was convinced in the late 1930s that Mises was right, and that the New Deal was wrong. He wrote a positive review of Mises's book, Socialism, for the New York Times Book Review in 1938. This book had been published in South Africa in 1936, although it had been available in German since 1922. I think it is safe to call him an early adopter. He understood the magnitude of what Mises had been teaching long before most American economists had read Mises's books.

Hazlitt's critique of John Maynard Keynes, published in 1959, The Failure of the 'New Economics,' is a comprehensive and thoroughly readable critique of Keynes's General Theory. It was ignored by the academic profession, possibly because it was so thorough in its criticisms, but probably because Hazlitt was noted as a financial journalist, not as a professor of economics somewhere. He did not have the right credentials, so the academic community ignored him. I don't think this bothered him in the slightest.

He was always enthusiastic. He was always extremely lively. In this sense, he reminded me of Murray Rothbard and Burt Blumert, the co-founder of the Center for Libertarian Studies. I never saw him dejected in any way.

I suppose my best recollection of him was late in his life, when he was in a retirement home. At his age, there were not many men in the home. He remarked, twinkle in his eye, that a lot of the ladies in the home made a fuss over him. Then, coming to his senses, he added, "but don't tell Frances." Frances was Mrs. Hazlitt. He was altogether a sensible man.

Again, the lesson is clear: stick to your knitting, and stick to your guns.

Leonard E. Read…

If anyone deserves the title of the founder of libertarianism, it is Read. He was a born promoter. He was the head of the Chamber of Commerce in Los Angeles in the 1930s. He had never gone to college. He was an effective speaker, and in later years, he proved to be an effective writer. He was never a back-slapper, but he was never confrontational, either.

His story of how he was converted to a free market position made an impression on me. He had gone to see the head of the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, William Mullendore. He went there, as he said, "to straighten out this fellow." By the time he had spent a couple hours being taught the principles of voluntarism, he realized that the worldview which he had held when he walked in the door was wrong.

From that day on, he was not really in alignment with the Chamber of Commerce. The chamber was always ready to promote government intervention in favor of business. From that fateful meeting onward, Leonard Read was not.

A decade later, he turned down a job heading the International Chamber of Commerce, which would have paid him $100,000 a year, which in 1946 was a fortune. Instead, he started the Foundation for Economic Education. He had contacts with rich men because of his time spent in the Chamber, but he always attempted to establish a broad-based support for the organization. FEE was not a rich men's plaything. In 1956, he launched the magazine which served as the major source of recruiting for the libertarian movement for the next 20 years: The Freeman. William F Buckley had wanted to buy it, but Read owned the name, and a year after Buckley started National Review, FEE started publishing The Freeman.

While Read was not a trained economist, he had a very clear understanding of how free markets operate. He wrote an article which I regard as the finest statement of the principle of the division of labor that has ever been written. It is called "I, Pencil." It is the story of how nobody knows how to make a pencil. A simple pencil is such a complex device that it takes coordination and cooperation beyond anyone's ability to comprehend in order to produce a simple pencil.

This insight has persuaded an untold number of people of the power and creativity of the free market. What was also creative about the article is that he wrote it as a narrative given by a pencil. He listed his own name only with these introductory words: "as told to."

He also wrote a classic little book, which is unfortunately out of print, Elements of Libertarian Leadership. He wrote many other books, and numerous collections of essays. He never stopped writing, almost until the day he died at the age of 84.

Here is the same lesson: stick to your knitting, and stick to your guns. He turned down a lot of money in 1946 to do this.

Both libertarians were not trained economists; Hazlitt even “never went to college”, yet both came out with classic economic books and articles. Bottom line: economics can be self-learned. Try the Mises Institute