What’s Your Favorite Nonfiction Book?

(Austrian) Economics, Anti-Statism, Education
By / / 1 Comment / 2 minutes of reading
Share

There are several useful bibliographies and recommended reading lists out there. See, e.g.:

I also published my own list, The Greatest Libertarian Books, a few years ago, and expanded on it in the post Top Ten Books of Liberty and Other Top Ten Lists of Libertarian Books..

Of the books I’ve read, I’d have to say the most important, significant, and influential one I’ve ever read is Hans-Hermann Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism. As I wrote in my LRC piece:

Topping my list is A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, as well as a host of other works, by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, our greatest living intellectual. Hoppe’s other influential works include Democracy: The God That Failed, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, and Economic Science and the Austrian Method. Sure, Hoppe stands on the shoulders of giants — primarily Mises and Rothbard — but to my mind his edifice of thought is the pinnacle of Austro-libertarian thinking. Somewhat sobering is the realization that Hoppe was only forty when he wrote Capitalism. Gulp.

This is one reason I did an extensive review essay of the The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, in 1994. And used it for my own theories, e.g. on rights, contract, IP, and the like. And conducted a whole Mises Academy course around Hoppe’s thought. TSC is systematic, lucid, dense, stimulating, and solidly anchored in Misesian praxeology and economics and Rothbardian political radicalism, while extending both. My copy is peppered with marginalia and notes. Such an amazing book. If you can only read part: Chapters 1, 2, and 7. But you must read the whole thing.

What are your favorites, more important, most influential?

What’s Your Favorite Nonfiction Book? Read Post »

Government stats now eyed with suspicion

Business, Business Cycles
By / / 2 minutes of reading
Share

Another one of the positive side effects of the current economic crisis is that even the government’s statistics, once accepted uncritically by the media, are now faced with some skepticism. As someone who examines government statistics often, I can say that government stats definitely have their uses, assuming you consider the methods used, and take it all with a grain of salt. But for years, the stats had been accepted as gospel and as a reliable foundation for the practice of macro economics.

To be sure, this article at Fortune today doesn’t actually impugn the unemployment rate itself, but it does question its relevance. Titled “The increasingly irrelevant unemployment rate,” the article notes that the unemployment rate, touted for years by the government and the media as a reliable index of economic strength, doesn’t really give us a good picture of reality anymore – assuming it ever did.

With labor force participation at the lowest point in a generation, the addition of the few new jobs added in May hardly convinces us that the economy is improving, and indeed, as new jobs were added – some of those people who gave up on finding work rejoined the workforce and drove the unemployment rate up, not down.

So, the unemployment rate tells us nothing without an understanding of labor force participation, and that is a pretty iffy number. It’s now becoming well-known that the method used to generate the unemployment rate is fatally flawed. The survey method used in the Household Survey ignores all the underemployed and chronically unemployed people who would love to have a full-time job. The labor force then only really consists of recently unemployed and people who absolutely must have jobs now. This excludes recent college grads living in their basements and stay at home moms who would otherwise be wage earners, and earl-y retirees who can’t find another job.

This is a huge shadow inventory of unemployed people not picked up in the official unemployment rate. Who can take a politician seriously who quotes these stats as proof of anything?

And for that matter, who can take a macro economist seriously who attempts to manage the economy this way? The decline in the reputation of government stats also nicely follows the decline of faith in macro economists to manage the economy to perfection. Does anyone think that a macro economist feeding the unemployment rate into a computer model somewhere will know just what to do? That dream died in 2008.

Government stats now eyed with suspicion Read Post »

The Amazing Hume

(Austrian) Economics, IP Law, Libertarian Theory
By / / 4 Comments / 4 minutes of reading
Share

Of late I’ve begun to realize how amazingly insightful David Hume was on several important issues:

  • Hume recognized the importance of scarcity in the definition of what property is. Austro-libertarian political philosopher Hans-Hermann Hoppe relies heavily on this aspect of property in chs. 1-2 of A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, far more explicitly than previous political theorists. Even Rothbard and Mises did not focus as intensely on this crucial issue. (See my post Hume on Intellectual Property and the Problematic “Labor” Metaphor.)1
  • Hume recognized that Locke’s use of “labor” in his homesteading argument was really just figurative and that no assumption of labor-ownership is needed for Locke’s homesteading argument to work. Without the Lockean labor confusion, much of the intellectual case for IP evaporates (and we might have avoided the spread of the labor theory of value that infects Smithian economics and Marxism). (See my post Hume on Intellectual Property and the Problematic “Labor” Metaphor.)
  • His recognition of the is-ought gap. Writes Hans-Hermann Hoppe: “one can readily subscribe to the almost generally accepted view that the gulf between ‘ought’ and ‘is’ is logically unbridgeable.” (A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, p. 163.)
  • His explanation that the state is able to maintain power only because most people give it their tacit support. As Hoppe writes:
  • “One must conclude, then, that the problem of explaining how the few can rule the many is indeed real, and that socialism and the state as the incorporation of socialism must rest in addition to aggression on some sort of active support among the public.”David Hume is one of the classic expositors of this insight. In his essay on “The first principles of government” he argues:
    “‘Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we inquire by what means this wonder is effected we shall find, that as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded, and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular. The soldan of Egypt, or the emperor of Rome, might drive his harmless subjects, like brute beasts, against their sentiments and inclination. But he must, at least, have led his mamalukes or praetorian bands, like men, by their opinion.'” (See Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, p. 179.)
  • His insight that any supply of money is optimal, also a key Austrian insight. (See Hoppe, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, p. 194; Block & Barnett, On the Optimum Quantity of Money.)
  • His apparent opposition to fractional-reserve banking (see Huerta de Soto, note 5): “Before Mises, the most distinguished author who defended the one hundred percent reserve requirement was David Hume in his essay “Of Money” (1752), where he states that “no bank could be more advantageous, than such a one as locked up all the money it received, and never augmented the circulating coin, as is usual, by returning part of its treasure into commerce.” David Hume, Essays: Moral Political and Literary (Indianapolis, Ind.: LibertyClassics, 19851, pp. 284-85.”
  • His realization that you could never empirically observe causation. As Hoppe writes, citing Hume: “there exists no ‘band’ that one could observe to connect visibly certain variables as causes and effects.” (A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, p. 124; see also The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, pp. 289, 298.)

Update: See also Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s brief discussion of Hume in the video clip below.

See also Cordato and Kirzner on Intellectual Property (April 21, 2011)

  1. See also Wendy McElroy on Benjamin Tucker: “Tucker, however, asked the question in more fundamental terms; he asked why the concept of property existed at all.  What was there in the nature of man and of reality that made such a concept necessary?  He postulated that property arose as a means of solving conflicts caused by scarcity.  Since all goods are scarce, there is competition for their use.  Since the same chair cannot be used at the same time and in the same manner by two people, it becomes necessary to determine who should use the chair.  Property arose as an answer to this question.  “If it were possible,” Tucker wrote, “and if it has always been possible, for an unlimited number of individuals to use to an unlimited extent and in an unlimited number of places the same concrete thing at the same time, there would never have been any such thing as the institution of property.””  ↩

The Amazing Hume Read Post »

Austrian AV Club—Kinsella and the Corporation on Trial

(Austrian) Economics, Anti-Statism, Business, Libertarian Theory
By / / 1 Comment / 1 minute of reading
Share

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).

Update: now on the KOL115 podcast.

Austrian AV Club—Kinsella and the Corporation on Trial Read Post »

Scroll to Top