Author: David Gordon

On April 13, the United States launched a missile attack on Syria, in response to an alleged chemical attack using chlorine gas by the Syrian government on the town of Douma, Was this attack justified? One way to answer this question appeals to the “just war” tradition, developed by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, and further refined by Vitoria, Suarez, Hugo Grotius, and other thinkers.  The criteria for a just war are stringent, and the missile attack violates a number of them. So stringent are the criteria that one authority, Charles Journet, said “if the definition of just war provided by … Continue reading →

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It is hardly a secret that Pope Francis opposes the free market. On what grounds does he do so? Do any of these grounds have merit? What are the sources of his ideas? How similar are his views to those of previous Popes? These are among the questions addressed by the contributors to this important book. The Pope maintains that the free market encourages the false ideology of “consumerism.” People under capitalism want more material goods, but their pursuit ends not in happiness but in futility. Robert M. Whaples, the editor of the volume and Professor of Economics at Wake … Continue reading →

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Will Wilkinson, the vice president for policy at the Niskanen Center, does not like the tax bill just passed by Congress. Writing in  The New York Times, he finds the legislation “notably generous to corporations, high earners, inheritors of large estates and the owners of private jets.” Wilkinson has discovered a surprising source for the legislation he dislikes so much. It is none other than the libertarian idea, promoted by Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand, that taxation is theft. Under their theory of “absolute” property rights, taxation was “morally criminalized.”  Democratic majorities, in this view, cannot override property rights. Wilkinson rejects … Continue reading →

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The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Economic Growth, and Increase Inequality. By Brink Lindsey and Steven M. Teles. Oxford University Press, 2017. Viii + 221 pages. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Progressives claimed that the American political system was corrupt. Large financial and business interests dominated the government. What should be done to end their noxious influence and to promote the public good? Guidance from intellectuals, not wheeling and dealing by corrupt politicians, should set the political agenda. Nonpartisan scientific experts should take over much of the day-to-day work of government. In his definitive Roots … Continue reading →

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Many people in Catalonia wish to secede from Spain and form their own country, but the Spanish government has used force to block them from doing so. What should libertarians think of this conflict? In trying to answer this question, it is useful to seek guidance from Mises and Rothbard. Not that these two thinkers are always right, but it is a safe bet that these two giants of twentieth-century social science will have something illuminating to say. Mises addresses the issue directly. In Omnipotent Government, he criticizes the eminent Spanish liberal Salvador de Madariaga for his opposition to Catalonian independence. … Continue reading →

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Organizations named for someone often are accused of deviating from that person’s ideas, and the Mises Institute unfortunately is no exception. Recently, we have come under attack along the following lines: “Ludwig von Mises was a cosmopolitan, opposed to nationalism and racism. But the Mises institute, though named after him, has betrayed him. Guided by Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell, the Institute has opposed liberal humanist values. Mises would never have done this.” To assess this accusation, we must first ask, what is meant by “cosmopolitan”? The word is a translation from a Greek term introduced by Diogenes the Cynic in … Continue reading →

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The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve Peter Conti-Brown Princeton University Press, 2016xiv + 347 pages . Peter Conti-Brown, a legal historian who teaches at the Wharton School, would sharply dissent from Ron Paul’s wish to End the Fed. He never cites Mises or Rothbard, and the only Austrian work that he mentions, hidden away in an endnote, is Vera Smith’s The Rationale of Central Banking and the Free Banking Alternative. Nevertheless, Austrians will find Conti-Brown’s book of great value. He has, with considerable scholarship, exposed many grave problems with the Fed in a way that strengthens and supports the … Continue reading →

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Review of Jeffrey C. Herndon, Eric Voegelin and the Problem of Christian Order (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2007), 216 pp. $39.95. Many people, I suspect, find themselves in this position. They have heard that Eric Voegelin is a great philosopher of history, much esteemed by such eminent conservatives as Willmoore Kendall, Russell Kirk, and Mel Bradford, and that he and Leo Strauss rank as the most influential political theorists of the contemporary American Right.1 They eagerly obtain a copy of Voegelin’s most comprehensive work, Order and History. They are intrigued by the book’s opening: “The order of history emerges from the history … Continue reading →

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Like his godfather—the legendary provost of Trinity College, John Pentland Mahaffy—Walter Starkie (1894–1976) was one of the great Irish conversationalists. When I met him in 1969, he bowled me over. I was then a senior at UCLA, writing a paper on British foreign policy in the Spanish Civil War. I interviewed Starkie, then in his early seventies and teaching in six different departments. He had been head of the British Council in Spain during World War II and was intimately familiar with all the major Spanish and British political figures of the 1930s and ’40s. Indeed, he seemed to know … Continue reading →

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[Unequivocal Justice. By Christopher Freiman. Routledge, 2017. Ix + 157 pages.] Christopher Freiman has in this brilliant book uncovered a flaw at the heart of much contemporary political philosophy, especially the sort of ideal theory influenced by John Rawls. Freiman wishes “to examine the version of ideal theory that focuses on institutions. More specifically, I’ll investigate the idealizing assumption that institutions function under conditions that exhibit ‘strict compliance’ with justice: that is, conditions in which everyone accepts and abides by the principles of justice.” (p.5) The objection that Freiman raises to ideal theory is that its advocates face a dilemma. If everyone … Continue reading →

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The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics by John B. Judis Columbia Global Reports, 2016 Donald Trump’s victory in the November 2016 election for president of the United States astonished the world. Though he had never held political office, he won the Republican nomination. The leading polls predicted his loss to Hillary Clinton in the general election, but he prevailed. How was this possible? John Judis’s book was written before Trump’s ultimate triumph, but it offers an important account of the reasons for Trump’s rise to prominence. Unfortunately, this account rests on bad economics. Judis … Continue reading →

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One of the most influential theories in contemporary political philosophy is “luck egalitarianism.” The late G.A. Cohen stated the position in this way, in his Rescuing Justice and Equality (Harvard, 2008): People with greater-than-average talents and abilities should not in justice receive more wealth and income than others, even if their work is more productive and valuable than their less-fortunately-endowed coworkers. People do not deserve the abilities by which they surpass others, and my own animating conviction … [is] that an unequal distribution whose inequality cannot be vindicated by some choice or fault or desert on the part of (some of) … Continue reading →

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Sebastian Mallaby is the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economic Relations at the Council on Foreign Relations. One can be sure, then, that his new comprehensive book, The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan, reflects an Establishment point of view. As if this were not enough to tell us where the book is coming from, Mallaby informs us that he had Greenspan’s full cooperation in writing it. “This book is based on almost unlimited access to Alan Greenspan, his papers, and his colleagues and friends, all of whom were generous in their collaboration. Though the book is … Continue reading →

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If asked to name the foremost critic of Marxism, most economists sympathetic to the free market would name Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, who in his treatise Capital and Interest and his separate brochure Karl Marx and the Close of His System demolished the labor theory of value, the linchpin of Marxist economics. But the labor theory is but one part of Marxism: what about the remainder of the system? Here one must turn to the work of Böhm-Bawerk’s greatest student, Ludwig von Mises, whose devastating analysis of Marxism is of surpassing excellence. His contribution to the critique of Marxism is principally … Continue reading →

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Nietzsche’s Great Politics. By Hugo Drochon. Princeton University Press, 2016. xv + 200 pages. In the nineteenth century, most classical liberals believed that the state had to provide protective services. Gustave de Molinari disagreed; in The Production of Security (1849), he argued that private companies could provide these services. But few joined him in denying that what Lassalle derided as a “night watchman state” was necessary; and even Molinari in his later years retreated from his earlier radicalism on this issue.1 Hugo Drochon, a distinguished intellectual historian at Cambridge University, has in this brilliant new book pointed to another thinker … Continue reading →

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