A great new libertarian resource: Libertarianism.org

Anti-Statism, Education, Libertarian Theory, The Basics
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The new Libertarianism.org, a project of the Cato Institute, is a gorgeous website containing a well-organized set of information about libertarian ideas, history, and people. I am just exploring it but am amazed at how smooth and elegant the site design and organization of material is. It contains introductory material for newcomers and current and more advanced material as well, and it highlights the work of a host of people influential on libertarian ideas. Check it out.

For a good overview of the site’s aims and contents, see the welcoming post from Nov. 3, 2011, by Aaron Ross Powell. (My fellow TLS blogger Wirkman Virkkala blogged about it previously at New Libertarian Website Launched.)

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Mises Seminar — Australia

(Austrian) Economics, Anti-Statism, Education, Libertarian Theory, Statism, The Basics
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Austrian and libertarian ideas are spreading around the globe, thanks in large part to the work done by the Mises Institute to promote and spread these ideas. A case in point is the Mises Seminar being held November 25 and 26 in Sydney, Australia, and being put on by Aussienomics, an Austrian-Australian group, Liberty Australia, and the Macquare University Libertarian League. As the Aussienomics site notes,

On the 25-26th of November, a watershed moment in the history of Australian liberty will be occurring in Sydney: the Australian Mises Seminar. Over the past year we have collaborated with the best and brightest representatives of Austrian economics and libertarianism in Australia to bring you this incredible weekend.

The lead speaker at the event Hans-Hermann Hoppe. The event looks like it will be fantastic and soundly rooted in principled Rothbardian libertarian and Misesian-Rothbardian Austrian economics.

What really impressed me was the beautiful 108 page programme they produced (yes, 108 pages). It’s full of nice pictures and illustrations of Mises, Rothbard, and others, inspiring quotes, and an overview of the seminar. The main reason for its length, however is that it contains “Pre-Seminar Reading”. I’ve never seen this in a programme before but it’s a great idea (and possibly only because the material they drew from was from sources that do not lock down the content using state copyright law). As the programme explains:

The readings help provide a basic foundation and understanding of the core principles used to analyse the more complex issues that will be under discussion at the seminar. They will help you follow the overall themes and make informed contributions should you choose to do so. As a result, everyone gets more from attending the seminar.

The overview section first contains an article entitled A Primer on Austrian Economics by Jonathan M. Finegold Catalan which gives a brief summary of the school of thought, its history and contributions. The fundamental difference between advocates of the Austrian school and the rest of the economics profession is methodology. The second chapter of Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s book Economic Science and the Austrian Method, is On Praxeology and the Praxeological Foundation of Epistemology. This enthralling exposition highlights Mises insights and makes the case for praxeology as the ultimate foundation of all knowledge. Anatomy of the State by Murray N. Rothbard exemplifies the case as to what the state is, what it is not and why its existence should be lamented. What Libertarianism Is by Stephan Kinsella clarifies what separates libertarianism from other political philosophies.

The programme may be downloaded here. A podcast by some of the organizers discussing the Seminar may be found here.

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Protesting Narrow Economics

Business Cycles, Education
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I am pretty sure that, had I taken economics in school, I would never have developed an interest in it.

One of my hobbies is collecting economics textbooks. They are not uniformly bad — I have gained insights from those by Alchian and Allen, David D. Friedman, Gwartney and Stroup, and a few others — but they are not as good as the old “Principles”-style texts from days of yore. You know, general theory books covering a lot of ground for a wide audience including amateurs, written (in the best cases) in readable English (or other common tongue) and not littered with Q&As and “work problems” and “call-out” boxes of biographies of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, and the ever-present Keynes. The best of the old-fashioned treatises, such as by F.W. Taussig, and especially the “anachronistic” efforts by Ludwig von Mises (Human Action) and Murray Rothbard (Man, Economy and State), outshine all econ texts used in colleges today.

Part of the problem is that the textbook industry is a mostly corrupt adjunct to the university system, the main idea being to milk as much money as possible from students. The often-annual revisions in textbooks are usually trivial . . . but quite necessary for the planned obsolescence of the media, allowing universities to renege on buy-backs, thus keeping multi-hundred dollar purchases coming into their revenue streams. Change a few pictures, charge $300+.

This perverse industry has arisen, in part, in response to the near-unlimited demand stemming from subsidized tuitions and student loans. …

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A New Approach to Commercial Publishing: The New LFB

Anti-Statism, Business, Education, IP Law
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Laissez-Faire Books was founded in 1972 when issues of intellectual property hadn’t been worked out in detail in the libertarian world. There was of course the Randian view, which took IP to the most absurd extremes. Then there was the Rothbardian view, which had a very strict view of what is and what is not property and because IP doesn’t pass this test, the Rothbardian perspective tended toward the open model.

LFB itself never questioned the statist conventions on this topic. In fact, it even went through a period in which its owner worked to send take down notices to sites for posting old books to which it claimed the rights. How well I recall my own disgust! LFB uses the state to stop the spread of libertarian ideas! That’s just incredible.

Well, Agora Financial took over the institution this year and it immediately became obvious that they were Kinsellaites on this question. While working at the Mises Institute, I had worked with the new LFB to do some co-publishing in the commons. So when I accepted the position as publisher and executive editor, I made it a condition that, wherever possible, we always publish into the commons.

Management readily agreed, and even wondered why I was making such a big deal out of this. After all, this is a gigantically successful company and they have learned that the most important way to sell a product is to market it as widely and broadly as possible. If by putting something in the commons, you stand to reach more people, isn’t this a great thing? Isn’t this what commerce is all about? And from a mission point of view, isn’t this what libertarian education is all about?

Indeed it is! I immediately felt that we would soon be running an important experiment: a large scale publisher in the world of commerce would soon be publishing with Creative Commons and eschewing copyright in every way. This is a massive step for the libertarian world and even for the world of publishing in general.

…

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New Libertarian Website Launched

(Austrian) Economics, Anti-Statism, Education, Libertarian Theory, The Basics
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Cato Institute has launched a new website: libertarianism.org. In a previous incarnation, the domain served as a promotion page for David Boaz’s Libertarianism: A Primer.

Designed to be an introductory and exploratory — if not quite a portal — site, it sports an elegant, stylized dove-wing logo. This is Cato’s version of what the Advocates for Self-Government offer at libertarianism.com. But Cato’s new site offers more links and videos on its front page, so it is bound to get more hits. The site offers a basic banner introduction:

LIBERTY. It’s a simple idea, but it’s also the linchpin of a complex system of values and practices: justice, prosperity, responsibility, toleration, cooperation, and peace. Many people believe that liberty is the core political value of modern civilization itself, the one that gives substance and form to all the other values of social life. THEY’RE CALLED LIBERTARIANS.

Well, that’s one way of putting it.

Just below the banner, a video of an F.A. Hayek lecture on why ethics not arise from our reason. A familiar Hayekian topic, and I just started listening to it. Below that are three other videos, one by Milton Friedman on humility, a short (and terrific) Murray Rothbard lecture on economic recessions, and Joan Kennedy Taylor on feminism. Today’s featured essays are by George H. Smith (“Religious Toleration Versus Religious Freedom”) and Tom G. Palmer (“Myths of Individualism.”) …

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