Update: I’m doing a Substack Live today on You Have No Right to Your Culture with the Boyd Institute’s Peter Banks. 4 PM ET.SummaryThis is the shortest chapter of the book, just six pages long. Rothbard makes a laundry list of what he calls “the major problem areas of our society” and argues that government…
SummaryRothbard now applies the normative standards developed in chapter 2 to explain what libertarians have against government (or as Rothbard, inspired by Germanic capitalization, calls it, “the State”). The argument is simple: If a private individual did what governments do, almost everyone would call him a criminal. If I took your money without your consent, I’d…
SummaryIn this chapter (“Property and Exchange”), Rothbard introduces the “non-aggression axiom,” also often known as the “non-initiation of force axiom.” The intuition is simple enough: No one has the right to start using physical violence or the threat thereof against another person or his property. This is one of the first moral rules we learn as…
Here’s my plan: I’ll lead off each discussion of Murray Rothbard’s For a New Liberty with (a) a brief summary of the chapter of the week, and (b) some critical comments. But this is your book club, so in the comments feel free to not only to discuss my summary and critique, but any thoughts…
My trip to Argentina last year motivated me to write Part I of this series, which focused on whether things might get better in that tragic country for the simple reason that they couldn’t possibly get any worse. In Part II of this series, I analyzed whether a libertarian candidate’s surprisingly strong performance in Argentina’s […]
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
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