What's New...

NEW 4/18/2013: Bibliography on Methodological Individualism [More...]

A critical, extended bibliography. [more...]

NEW 4/18/2013: The Strange Case of Dr Hayek and Mr Hayek [More...]

An excellent overview of Hayek's life and career, giving good weight to his failures and inconsistencies. There is also a long appendix about the socialist calculation debate. [more...]

NEW 4/18/2013: Socialist Calculation Debate

A debate about how a socialist economy would be able to allocate resources between goals without resort to capitalism. The debate tends to ignore the fact that Communist and wartime command economies did very well with centralized planning. Not to mention Walmart. [more...]

NEW 4/17/2013: 12 Rules of Goldbuggery [More...]

"Ignore the risks of being a gold bug at great peril to your portfolio..." [more...]

NEW 4/15/2013: Libertarian And Objectivism Are Both Stolen Terms

Libertarianism has been used by philosophers about free will for 200 years. Libertarian was used by anarchists for roughly 100 years before it was recently co-opted by right-wing American libertarians. Objectivism was used by Gottlob Frege for his philosophical realism decades before Rand's adoption. The Objectivist Poets also used the term before Rand did.[more...]

NEW 4/14/2013: Freedom in the World [More...]

A respectable index of freedom, and a good alternative to libertarian, neoliberal and corporatist indexes. Produced by Freedom House. Based on 10 political rights questions and 15 civil liberties questions. [more...]

NEW 4/14/2013: Free, Free at Last [More...]

"An "Economic Freedom Index" that tells us little about economic growth or political freedom is a slipshod measure that would seem to have no other purpose other than to sell the neoliberal policies that stand in the way of most people gaining control over their economic lives and obtaining genuine economic freedom in today's global economy." [more...]

NEW 4/14/2013: The Questionable Record of Neoliberalism [More...]

"I’ll take a brief look at [...] the US & UK, Chile, Hong Kong & Singapore, and Scandinavia. I believe that in none of these instances do we get a clear example of neoliberal policies succeeding economically." [more...]

NEW 4/14/2013: Bitcoin is ludicrous, but it tells us something important about the nature of money [More...]

Bitcoin's inelasticity of supply means it would have the same macroeconomic problems as gold, causing deflation. [more...]

NEW 4/14/2013: Adam Smith Hates Bitcoin [More...]

"[...] people think it’s smart, nay cutting-edge, to create a sort of virtual currency whose creation requires wasting real resources in a way Adam Smith considered foolish and outmoded in 1776." [more...]

NEW 4/13/2013: Why should anyone have to read your goofy holy book? [More...]

If you are arguing against a libertarian position, you don't need to have read "collections of rationalizations, inconsistent and incoherent" to take an opposing position. All you need is to identify where the position is wrong. [more...]

NEW 4/13/2013: Criticisms of the Non-Libertarian FAQ

Over 20 years, numerous libertarians have criticized A Non-Libertarian FAQ. Their criticisms are surprisingly lame, with rather obvious errors. [more...]

NEW 4/13/2013: Gish Gallop [More...]

The debating technique of drowning the opponent in such a torrent of half-truths, lies, and straw-man arguments that the opponent cannot possibly answer every falsehood in real time.[more...]

NEW 4/13/2013: The Courtier’s Reply [More...]

PZ Meyers' description of how "The Emperor has no clothes!" is defended by sycophants, and why that defense is fallacious. You don't have to be an expert in libertarianism to know it is baseless. [more...]

NEW 4/13/2013: Libertarian Apologetics

Libertarians have standard techniques for defending their absurd ideas that overlap strongly with the techniques employed by religious believers. [more...]

NEW 4/13/2013: Libertarian Experiment in Iceland Fails [More...]

"In fact, economists are already using Iceland as a textbook case of how to ruin a nation's economy. As Paul Krugman recently noted, there is an "almost eerie correlation between conservative praise two or three years ago and economic disaster today." " [more...]

NEW 4/13/2013: Modern Iceland

Iceland's Independence Party made radical reforms inspired by and praised by Milton Friedman. These ended with a spectacular banking crash in 2009. [more...]

NEW 4/13/2013: Polycentric Law

Non-monopolistic, competing law. We actually already have that, with federal, state, and local law plus commonlaw. Some libertarian academics have made careers describing historical examples. Polycentric Law tends to be supplanted by more centralized law. [more...]

NEW 4/12/2013: Is Medieval Iceland an example of "anarcho"-capitalism working in practice? [More...]

An anarchist rebuttal: "Ironically, medieval Iceland is a good example of why "anarcho"-capitalism will not work, degenerating into de facto rule by the rich." [more...]

NEW 4/12/2013: Medieval Iceland

Many libertarians, reading David Friedman's paper on medieval Icelandic institutions, consider them to be an example of how anarcho-capitalism could work. [more...]

NEW 4/12/2013: Free Banking in Scotland [More...]

Supposed examples of free banking turn out to have other agencies acting as lenders of last resort. [more...]

NEW 4/12/2013: Free Banking

The idea of replacing central banks by allowing banks to issue their own currencies, with or without various backings. An idea revived by Friedrich von Hayek, with a literature of supposed historical examples. Free banking has many problems. [more...]

NEW 4/09/2013: There is no such thing as redistribution [More...]

"There is no default distribution. All distributions are the consequence of any number of institutional design choices, none of which are commanded by the fabric of the universe."[more...]

NEW 4/07/2013: The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time

Explains the socially constructed nature of "free markets", as opposed to "spontaneous order". A major work of economic history. [more...]

NEW 4/07/2013: Ten Modes of Individualism-- None of Which Works-- And Their Alternatives [More...]

Individualism comes in at least 10 modes, with flaws and merits for each. It is argued that systemism has all the virtues and none of the defects of individualism and holism. [more...]

NEW 4/07/2013: Philosophical Individualism

Individualism is merely one viewpoint in an enormous hierarchy of viewpoints ranging from Planck length to the universe. Individualism as a tenet of a philosophy transforms that philosophy into a Procrustean bed that cannot model the real world well, because the real world is not based on individuals. [more...]