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We Win the NY Times Prize

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The New York Times, whistling past the financial graveyard, paused over the weekend to smear the Mises Institute, Ron Paul, our other scholars, hardcore libertarianism, and me. Why? Because our ideas and our youth movement are gaining real traction. It is in effect a compliment. They have never faced opposition like ours before, and Ron Pauls tremendous resonance with young people has only made things worse from the Timess point of view.

The Times wants opponents who play the game, who accept the presuppositions of the regime, and who are willing to confine themselves to the narrow range of debate to which the Times would prefer to confine the American people.

The purpose of articles like the one over the weekend, it should be unnecessary to point out, is not to shed light. It is to demonize and destroy a school of thought that the regime considers threatening.

The article, for instance, notes that Ron spoke on the topic Do We Live in a Police State? earlier this month at a Mises Institute event, and that another speaker (me) spoke on American Fascism. The lecture titles are evidently supposed to be self-refuting, although you can listen to Rons remarks and read mine and decide for yourself. Its little wonder that the Times would want to ridicule the idea that American society could resemble a police state, given that papers cover-ups of the regimes surveillance of American citizens.

The rest of the article is an attempt to distort the philosophy of libertarianism and to demonize Ron and other prominent exponents of that philosophy.

The whole exercise reminds me of the time, not long ago, in which a state-endorsed hate group took a swipe at Murray Rothbard (1926-1995), known in his day as Mr. Libertarian. The writer summarized Murrays career in a single sentence about of all things lesbians during the Progressive Era.

Now consider: Rothbards 1,000-page treatise Man, Economy, and State was an extraordinary contribution to the field of economics; his two-volume history of economic thought has been praised by scholars across the board; his study of the Panic of 1819, published by Columbia University Press, received rave reviews in the scholarly journals and is still considered definitive; his Ethics of Liberty is a philosophical defense of self-ownership and the nonaggression principle, and so on.

And so on hardly does Rothbard justice: we havent mentioned his textbook on money and banking, his classic What Has Government Done to Our Money?, his four-volume history of colonial America, the scholarly journals he edited, the voluminous correspondence he kept up with the major thinkers of his day, and well, and so on.

And a critic tried to reduce this man this man! to one unfavorable sentence.

It used to be easy to do this: how, apart from driving to the library, was someone to discover Rothbard for himself? But today, discovering Rothbard is just a click away. And once you discover him his scholarship, his knowledge, the encouragement he gave to students, and his refusal to compromise his principles even when doing so would have meant career advancement you understand why the state wants to minimize or demonize him. No wonder the most popular piece of libertarian apparel is our Rothbard Enemy of the State T-shirt.

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We Win the NY Times Prize

January 26: Rand Paul, Dick Durbin, Michael Chertoff, Jesselyn Radack, Carolyn Ryan, Michael Powell, Mike Murphy …

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REP. LORETTA SANCHEZ:

Oh, I don't think so at all. I think the president has every single day of his presidency to look forward to. I remember when I was the national chair for the Democratic Party under Clinton and the Gore political season going on, and President Clinton was working so hard. And I know because we were out there and we were with the people, and I said to him, "Don't you ever get tired?" Because he'd work till 4:00, 5:00 in the morning campaigning and doing other things. And he said, "Loretta, I'm going to sleep the day after I leave the presidency."

DAVID GREGPRY:

Yeah, I don't know if that's--

REP. LORETTA SANCHEZ:

And he was just bubbly--

DAVID GREGORY:

--President Obama though, right?

REP. LORETTA SANCHEZ:

--energized. There was work to be done. And I still think-- when I look at immigration reform, which I believe we will see something happen this year, at least an effort to try to move it forward on the floor, we've got the small things, the debt ceiling that we've got to get passed right now. We've got tax reform. I know that my Michigan colleague, the chair of the Ways and Means, David Camp, is anxious to do this. Baucus is anxious to do this.

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January 26: Rand Paul, Dick Durbin, Michael Chertoff, Jesselyn Radack, Carolyn Ryan, Michael Powell, Mike Murphy ...

Dionne: Chris Christie on two levels at inauguration

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Its rare that you can look at your television screen and see not only what is happening but also what might have been. Chris Christies inaugural address Tuesday was at once a masterful summary of the best thinking among Republicans about where their party needs to move and a compendium of proclamations that now carry unfortunate double meanings.

The New Jersey governor gave the speech he would have given had there been no George Washington Bridge scandal and no allegations about the use of Hurricane Sandy relief money to pressure a local official on a development project.

You cant blame him for sticking to the old script. He now has to live his public life on two levels. And Christies speech made an important contribution: The tough former prosecutor denounced our dysfunctional, counterproductive approach to the drug problem.

We will end the failed war on drugs that believes that incarceration is the cure of every ill caused by drug abuse, Christie declared. We will make drug treatment available to as many of our nonviolent offenders as we can, and we will partner with our citizens to create a society that understands this simple truth every life has value and no life is disposable.

Forget the scandals for a moment: Christie here is speaking for an expanding consensus that (forgive me) bridges left and right, liberals and libertarians, about the foolishness of filling our prisons with those who are the victims of their own crimes. Pushing this cause along could be Christies good deed.

But like everything else in the speech, this passage also had a political purpose. Offering a dash of libertarianism, which appeals to a key subset of the Republican primary electorate, with a soupcon of compassion is just what the consultant gods would order up. And thats the sort of balance Christie struck throughout.

For the tea party ideologues, Christie dutifully mocked the power of almighty government to fix any problem, real or imagined. He fired a shot across the Hudson River, aimed perhaps at Bill de Blasio, New York Citys populist mayor. Lets be different than our neighbors, he said. Lets put more money in the pockets of our middle class by not taking it out of their pockets in the first place.

And even Rand Paul couldnt do better than this: I do not believe that New Jerseyans want a bigger, more expensive government that penalizes success and then gives the pittance left to a few in the name of income equity. What New Jerseyans want is an unfettered opportunity to succeed in the way that they define success.

But the ideology came draped in the finery of anti-partisan, anti-gridlock fashion, finished off with a flourish to a resurgent, caring brand of conservatism.

We have to be willing to play outside the red and blue boxes that the media pundits put us in, said the man who also has other reasons for disliking the media. We have to be willing to reach out to others who look or speak differently than us; we have to be willing to personally reach out a helping hand to a neighbor or a friend suffering from drug addiction, depression or the dignity-stripping loss of a job.

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Dionne: Chris Christie on two levels at inauguration

The Mises Institute and the Future of Higher Education

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Mises Institute Senior Fellow Thomas Woods in October launched The Tom Woods Show, which quickly became a top-rated podcast on iTunes. Woods recently interviewed Mises Institute Chairman Lew Rockwell on the show, and toward the end of the interview, Woods asked Lew about his vision for the future of the Institute. The following is adapted from the interview:

Thomas Woods: What would you like to see the Institute doing that it isnt doing today?

Lew Rockwell: I think the Mises Institute represents the future of higher education. Thanks to federal subsidies, the price of an education at the brick-and-mortar universities has become prohibitive for so many people. Decades ago, Ron Paul worked his way through college but that sounds like science fiction today. Almost no one can work his way through college anymore.

So what the state has done, as with medical care, is made it impossible for students to pay for college with the wages and savings that young people can muster, so the students take on these horrendous debts to receive instruction at institutions that are, by and large, either teaching error, or theyre teaching the official boring views of official academia.

There has been so little innovation in the mainstream higher education industry. Peter Klein points out that colleges and universities still use the same production model that Aristotle used, with someone lecturing students from the front of the room while students sit quietly at their desks.

There are, of course, different ways to do this, and the Mises Institute is at the cutting edge of those different ways. Many young people are sick and tired of these long five- and six-year terms necessary to complete college. The universities and colleges so often make it difficult to get all the courses needed at times that work for the students, and of course, the longer it takes to get the degree, the bigger the students debts will be.

But theres another way to do it, and as we see with the online courses of Mises Academy, and with our in-person programs such as Mises University the Rothbard Graduate Seminar, there is much greater respect for the student and his or her time. Depending on the program, students can complete them quickly, and often on a schedule tailored to the students needs, and the Mises Institute then issues certificates to those who successfully finish the programs.

Meanwhile, were finding that employers are often treating these certificates as something equivalent to college credit when considering employment for our alumni. This makes sense, of course, since the Mises Institute teaches students how to engage in true economic reasoning and to think like someone who truly understands economics; the type of economics described by Mises.

But of course its not just our online education that is paving the way for a new kind of education. Back in 2011, when Sebastian Thrun, then a professor at Stanford, decided to begin offing online courses on robotics and artificial intelligence, 160,000 people enrolled in the first class. After that, Thrun decided to leave behind his tenured position and founded a new online education operation through which he believes he can reach half a million students with low-cost higher education taught by some of the worlds best faculty.

The demand for these online educational programs illustrates just how useful they are in the marketplace, and the Mises Institute is already part of this new world of higher education.

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The Mises Institute and the Future of Higher Education

The Brothel King: Dennis Hof on Prostitution, Wild West Libertarianism, and "Pimpin’ for Paul" – Video

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The Brothel King: Dennis Hof on Prostitution, Wild West Libertarianism, and "Pimpin #39; for Paul"
"Nevada #39;s the last of the live and let live states," says Dennis Hof, the self-described "Brothel King" and owner and proprieter of Nevada #39;s Moonlite Bunny R...

By: ReasonTV

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The Brothel King: Dennis Hof on Prostitution, Wild West Libertarianism, and "Pimpin' for Paul" - Video

Libertarianism: Definition from Answers.com

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Libertarianism is one of the main philosophical positions related to the problems of free will and determinism, which are part of the larger domain of metaphysics.[1] In particular, libertarianism, which is an incompatibilist position,[2][3] argues that free will is logically incompatible with a deterministic universe and that agents have free will, and that, therefore, determinism is false.[4] Although compatibilism, the view that determinism and free will are not logically incompatible, is the most popular position on free will amongst professional philosophers,[5] metaphysical libertarianism is discussed, though not necessarily endorsed, by several philosophers, such as Peter van Inwagen, Robert Kane, Robert Nozick,[6]Carl Ginet, Hugh McCann, Harry Frankfurt, E.J. Lowe, Alfred Mele, Roderick Chisholm, Daniel Dennett,[7] Timothy O'Connor, Derk Pereboom, and Galen Strawson.[8]

The term "libertarianism" in a metaphysical or philosophical sense was first used by late Enlightenment free-thinkers to refer to those who believed in free will, as opposed to determinism.[9] The first recorded use was in 1789 by William Belsham in a discussion of free will and in opposition to "necessitarian" (or determinist) views.[10][11] Metaphysical and philosophical contrasts between philosophies of necessity and libertarianism continued in the early 19th century.[12]

Metaphysical libertarianism is one philosophical view point under that of incompatibilism. Libertarianism holds onto a concept of free will that requires the agent to be able to take more than one possible course of action under a given set of circumstances.

Accounts of libertarianism subdivide into non-physical theories and physical or naturalistic theories. Non-physical theories hold that the events in the brain that lead to the performance of actions do not have an entirely physical explanation, and consequently the world is not closed under physics. Such interactionist dualists believe that some non-physical mind, will, or soul overrides physical causality.

Explanations of libertarianism that do not involve dispensing with physicalism require physical indeterminism, such as probabilistic subatomic particle behavior theory unknown to many of the early writers on free will. Physical determinism, under the assumption of physicalism, implies there is only one possible future and is therefore not compatible with libertarian free will. Some libertarian explanations involve invoking panpsychism, the theory that a quality of mind is associated with all particles, and pervades the entire universe, in both animate and inanimate entities. Other approaches do not require free will to be a fundamental constituent of the universe; ordinary randomness is appealed to as supplying the "elbow room" believed to be necessary by libertarians.

Free volition is regarded as a particular kind of complex, high-level process with an element of indeterminism. An example of this kind of approach has been developed by Robert Kane,[13] where he hypothesises that,

In each case, the indeterminism is functioning as a hindrance or obstacle to her realizing one of her purposesa hindrance or obstacle in the form of resistance within her will which has to be overcome by effort.

Although at the time C. S. Lewis wrote Miracles,[14]Quantum Mechanics (and physical indeterminism) was only in the initial stages of acceptance, he stated the logical possibility that if the physical world was proved to be indeterministic this would provide an entry (interaction) point into the traditionally viewed closed system, where a scientifically described physically probable/improbable event could be philosophically described as an action of a non-physical entity on physical reality.

Nozick puts forward an indeterministic theory of free will in Philosophical Explanations.[6]

When human beings become agents through reflexive self-awareness, they express their agency by having reasons for acting, to which they assign weights. Choosing the dimensions of one's identity is a special case, in which the assigning of weight to a dimension is partly self-constitutive. But all acting for reasons is constitutive of the self in a broader sense, namely, by its shaping one's character and personality in a manner analogous to the shaping that law undergoes through the precedent set by earlier court decisions. Just as a judge does not merely apply the law but to some degree makes it through judicial discretion, so too a person does not merely discover weights but assigns them; one not only weighs reasons but also weights them. Set in train is a process of building a framework for future decisions that we are tentatively committed to.

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Libertarianism: Definition from Answers.com

Wild West Web needs a sheriff

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STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Editor's note: Douglas Rushkoff writes a regular column for CNN.com. He is a media theorist and the author of the new book "Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now."

(CNN) -- This week, champions of the "open net" are decrying a U.S. Court of Appeals decision striking down an FCC ruling that required Internet service providers to be neutral in their restrictions on bandwidth.

The idea here is that giant bandwidth users, like Netflix or YouTube, will be required to pay access providers, like Verizon or Time Warner Cable, for all that video they're streaming to the likes of us. Maybe they'd even be able to buy themselves a special faster lane on the Internet for their traffic.

Of course, "open Web" advocates see in the court decision the beginning of the end of a free and egalitarian Internet. By striking down the provisions of what the industry calls "net neutrality," the court has also struck down an Internet provider's obligation to let all content through its servers. In theory, they can now legally pick and choose whose media makes it to its subscribers. Which would stink.

But this whole issue, and the instantaneous outcry associated with every move by a court or agency, is more complex than it looks on the surface. By casting this issue in such stark terms, those who would defend Internet freedom from the evil corporations may just be playing into the hands of other corporations whose designs on the Internet are no better.

Douglas Rushkoff

In fact it seems like just yesterday when nearly all the Internet's champions were telling government to stay away from the net. The Web was home to the revival of Ayn Rand and a new spirit of techno-utopian libertarianism. The idea was: The free market will cure any glitches along the way, as technology firms simply compete to bring us the best.

The 1997 Wired cover story, "The Long Boom," argued that the only impediment to technology-fueled economic growth would be the regulation of the marketplace. "Open good, closed bad. Tattoo it on your forehead." This became a credo of Silicon Valley and the net in general.

People acted as if the Internet just emerged out of culture, like a technological extension of the collective human nervous system, rather than a network that was meticulously planned and built by government and, yes, Al Gore.

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Wild West Web needs a sheriff

How the tea party undermines conservatism

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One of the main problems with an unremittingly hostile view of government held by many associated with the tea party, libertarianism and constitutionalism is that it obscures and undermines the social contributions of a truly conservative vision of government.

Politics requires a guiding principle of public action. For popular liberalism, it is often the rule of good intentions: If it sounds good, do it. Social problems can be solved by compassionate, efficient regulation and bureaucratic management which is seldom efficient and invites unintended consequences in complex, unmanageable systems (say, the one-sixth of the U.S. economy devoted to health care). The signal light for government intervention is stuck on green.

For libertarians and their ideological relatives, the guiding principle is the maximization of individual liberty. It is a theory of government consisting mainly of limits and boundaries. The light is almost always red.

Conservatism offers a different principle of public action though a bit more difficult to explain than go or stop. In the traditional conservative view, individual liberty is ennobled and ordered within social institutions families, religious communities, neighborhoods, voluntary associations, local governments and nations. The success of individuals is tied to the health of these institutions, which prepare them for the responsible exercise of freedom and the duties of citizenship.

This is a limiting principle: Higher levels of government should show deference to private associations and local institutions. But this is also a guide to appropriate governmental action needed when local and private institutions are enervated or insufficient in scale to achieve the public good.

So conservatism is a governing vision that allows for a yellow light: careful, measured public interventions to encourage the health of civil society. There are no simple rules here. Some communities disproportionately affected by family breakdown, community chaos or damaging economic trends will need more active help. But government should, as the first resort, set the table for private action and private institutions creating a context in which civil society can flourish.

This goal has moral and cultural implications. Government has a necessary (if limited) role in reinforcing the social norms and expectations that make the work of civic institutions both possible and easier. Some forms of liberty say, the freedom to destroy oneself with hard drugs or to exploit men and women in the sex trade not only degrade human nature but damage and undermine families and communities and ultimately deprive the nation of competent, self-governing citizens.

But conservatives also need to take seriously the economic implications of this governing vision. Just as citizens must be prepared for the exercise of liberty, individuals must be given the skills and values human capital that will allow them to succeed in a free economy.

This is the essence of equal opportunity. But it is not a natural social condition. And many conservatives have failed to recognize the extent to which this defining American promise has been hollowed out.

Economic mobility is stalled for many poorer Americans, resulting in persistent, intergenerational inequality. This problem is more complex than an income gap. It involves wide disparities in parental time and investment, in community involvement and in academic accomplishment. These are traceable to a number of factors that defy easy ideological categorization, including the collapse of working-class families and the flight of decent blue-collar jobs.

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How the tea party undermines conservatism

A yellow light for government

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WASHINGTON One of the main problems with an unremittingly hostile view of government held by many associated with the tea party, libertarianism and constitutionalism is that it obscures and undermines the social contributions of a truly conservative vision of government.

Politics requires a guiding principle of public action. For popular liberalism, it is often the rule of good intentions: If it sounds good, do it. Social problems can be solved by compassionate, efficient regulation and bureaucratic management which is seldom efficient and invites unintended consequences in complex, unmanageable systems (say, the one-sixth of the U.S. economy devoted to health care). The signal light for government intervention is stuck on green.

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A yellow light for government

Sweet land of… conformity?

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Americans like to see themselves as rugged individualists, a nation defined by the idea that people should set their own course through life. Think of Clint Eastwood rendering justice, rule-bound superiors be damned. Think of Frank Sinatra singing My Way.

The idea that personal liberty defines America is deeply rooted, and shared across the political spectrum. The lifestyle radicals of the 60s saw themselves as heirs to this American tradition of self-expression; today, it energizes the Tea Party movement, marching to defend individual liberty from the smothering grasp of European-style collectivism.

But are Americans really so uniquely individualistic? Are we, for example, more committed individualists than people in those socialist-looking nations of Europe? The answer appears to be no.

For many years now, researchers worldwide have been conducting surveys to compare the values of people in different countries. And when it comes to questions about how much the respondents value the individual against the collective that is, how much they give priority to individual interest over the demand of groups, or personal conscience over the orders of authority Americans consistently answer in a way that favors the group over the individual. In fact, we are more likely to favor the group than Europeans are.

Surprising as it may sound, Americans are much more likely than Europeans to say that employees should follow a bosss orders even if the boss is wrong; to say that children must love their parents; and to believe that parents have a duty to sacrifice themselves for their children. We are more likely to defer to church leaders and to insist on abiding by the law. Though Americans do score high on a couple of aspects of individualism, especially where it concerns government intervening in the market, in general we are likelier than Europeans to believe that individuals should go along and get along.

American individualism is far more complex than our national myths, or the soap-box rhetoric of right and left, would have it. It is not individualism in the libertarian sense, the idea that the individual comes before any group and that personal freedom comes before any allegiance to authority. Research suggests that Americans do adhere to a particular strain of liberty one that emerged in the New World in which freedom to choose your allegiance is tempered by the expectation that you wont stray from the values of the group you choose. In a political climate where liberty is frequently wielded as a rhetorical weapon but rarely discussed in a more serious way, grasping the limits of our notion of liberty might guide us to building Americas future on a different philosophical foundation.

The image of America as the bastion of libertarianism is a long-established one. Our Founding Fathers stipulated a set of personal rights and freedoms in our key documents that was, by the standards of that day, radical. The quintessentially American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Self-Reliance, extolled the person who does not defer to outside authority or compromise his principles for the sake of any collectivity family, church, party, community, or nation.

This quality in the American character struck observers from overseas, including Alexis de Tocqueville, who in his 1830s book, Democracy in America, famously tied the relatively new word individualism to what seemed so refreshingly new about the Americans. Popular culture today reinforces this image by making heroes of men (its almost always men) who put principle above everything else, even if perhaps especially if that makes them loners.

But in modern America, when you look at real issues where individual rights conflict with group interests, Americans dont appear to see things this way at all. Over the last few decades, scholars around the world have collaborated to mount surveys of representative samples of people from different countries. The International Social Survey Programme, or ISSP, and the World Value Surveys, or WVS, are probably the longest-running, most reliable such projects. Starting with just a handful of countries, both now pose the same questions to respondents from dozens of nations.

Their findings suggest that in several major areas, Americans are clearly less individualistic than western Europeans. One topic pits individual conscience against the demands of the state. In 2006, the ISSP asked the question In general, would you say that people should obey the law without exception, or are there exceptional occasions on which people should follow their consciences even if it means breaking the law? At 45 percent, Americans were the least likely out of nine nationalities to say that people should at least on occasion follow their consciences far fewer than, for example, the Swedes (70 percent) and the French (78 percent). Similarly, in 2003, Americans turned out to be the most likely to embrace the statement People should support their country even if the country is in the wrong.

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Sweet land of... conformity?


  1. Libertarianism