Herbert Spencer

Mises on the Beach

by on July 3, 2011 @ 10:46 pm · 6 comments

in (Austrian) Economics, The Left, Vulgar Politics

When Michelle Bachmann confessed to taking the writings of Ludwig von Mises with her on vacation, I assumed she used the august Austrian economist as a soporific — not because Mises isn’t worth reading, or not exciting to read (I can’t tell you how my heart pounded when I first unleashed myself onto The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science), but because Bachmann has never said anything to suggest a scholarly or subtle mind, the kind of mind best suited for pleasure in reading Mises.

But a Salon writer, Andrew Leonard, has proven himself less dismissive of Bachmann than I. He, knowing nothing of Mises, set out to read Human Action. His conclusion? Well, he didn’t get very far into the book. But he did get far enough to tell us what he found. After reading a few chapters, he was struck by
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Missed It By That Much

by on January 13, 2011 @ 10:18 pm · 7 comments

in Libertarian Theory, Vulgar Politics

How close can a person get to the heart of a matter, and still pull back — just in time! — to avoid accepting any deep truth?

The answer seems to be: Very close. Microscopically close. Nanite-nudging nearness, measured in nanometers.

That margin of closeness was today put into black ink courtesy, once again, of Nobel Laureate economist and New York Times op-ed scribbler, Paul Krugman.

In “A Tale of Two Moralities,” Krugman once again hallucinates that a variant of libertarianism — unnamed, of course, and identified with “the right” — as being a major player in recent politics. He says the two moral notions that divide our nation, today, are as follows:

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