Friday, May 18, 2012

I was interviewed yesterday by Redmond Weissenberger, Director of the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Canada. We had a long-ranging discussion of the issue of corporations and limited liability, and we touched on other issues as well including causation and responsibility and the praxeological structure of human action; intellectual property; gay marriage and language; human rights as property rights, and free speech; corporate size and international trade in a free society, vs. left-libertarian claims to the contrary; nuclear power, energy, and environmentalists; eminent domain and the Keystone pipeline; Peter Klein and Murray Rothbard on the calculation problem and the upper limit to the firm; state monopolies versus the market; and practical and moral aspects of tax evasion and tax avoidance.

For background on some of the issues discussed, see my post Corporate Personhood, Limited Liability, and Double Taxation; also Causation and Aggression and California Gay Marriage Law Overturned: What Should Libertarians Think?; Peter Klein’s chapter “Economic Calculation and the Limits of Organization,” in The Capitalist and the Entrepreneur: Essays on Organizations and Markets; The Effects of Patent and Copyright on Hollywood Movies; Leveraging IP.

The video is below; audio file is here (83MB; 1:27 length).

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The Mises Institute Canada is holding its first Austrian Scholars Conference in Toronto, later this year. From its website:

October 5-6, 2012. 

University of Toronto, St. George Campus

Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Faculty, Students, Independent Scholars and  Observers Register Here

In order to help fulfill it’s mission, the Mises Institute of Canada is launching the Toronto Austrian Scholars Conference. The conference is designed to combine the opportunities of a professional meeting, with the added attraction of hearing and presenting new and innovative research, engaging in vigorous debate, and interacting with likeminded scholars who share research interests.

Papers and panels cover a wide range of fields that impact on the Austrian paradigm, including: monetary theory; international trade; money and banking; methodology; history of thought; economic history; business cycles; geography; interventionism; literature; political philosophy; philosophy of science; society, culture, and religion; business regulation; environmental political economy; and history and theory of war.

Participants who wish to present their papers must send an abstract to redmond@mises.ca no later than August 24th, 2012. Submissions will be accepted until all the time slots are taken. Abstracts should be two pages or less with double spacing, one-inch margins and 12 point font. Authors should indicate in the body of the e-mail if they would be willing to volunteer as discussants and/or session moderators.

Submission review and selection will be handled by Predrag Rajsic of the University of Guelph,  Walter Block the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Chair in Economics and Professor of Economics at Loyola University New Orleans and David Howden, chair of the Division of Business and Social Sciences at Saint Louis University Madrid.

The director of the conference is Redmond Weissenberger, Founding Director of the Ludwig von Mises Institute of Canada.

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