BUY MY BOOK OR ELSE!  Roderick T. Long

Archives: June 2006

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Aristotle, Anarchy, Action!

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

I’m back from San Diego, but once again I’m too busy to blog about it. (My backlog of things I want to blog about – my b(ack!)log? – has grown to monstrous dimensions.) But I’m not too busy to engage in a bit of shameless self-promotion:

Tomorrow I start my philosophy seminar on the praxeological foundations of libertarian ethics. To quote the prospectus:

On the one hand, the subjective-value approach to economics characteristic of the Austrian school might seem inhospitable to objective theories of ethical value. Yet on the other hand, philosophers like Socrates, Aristotle, and Aquinas based their objective conceptions of ethics on something rather like a praxeological analysis of subjective valuation; indeed, subjectivist economics and natural law ethics both originated from this common tradition. Can an objective ethics in a broadly Aristotelean tradition be grounded in praxeological considerations? And if so, what shape might a radical libertarian political theory take if built on such foundations?

The first half of the seminar will deal with the praxeological foundations of ethics. Topics include: do human beings have an ultimate end? can we knowingly choose the bad? how are morality and self-interest related? why should we care about other people’s interests? ...

The second half of the seminar will explore the implications of praxeological, Aristotelean ethics for such issues as property rights, contracts, land ownership, punishment and restitution, military policy, stateless legal systems, utilitarian vs. rights-based considerations, and the cultural preconditions of liberty.
A live webcast of the seminar will be available here, presumably followed eventually by archived recordings here.

There will also be two bonus lectures by David Gordon, on Narveson and Nozick. Be there or B2!

Posted June 25th, 2006
Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog06-06.htm#03
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 Alcazar Gardens, El Prado, Balboa Park, San Diego

Before the Law Stands a Doorkeeper

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

The more “moderate” opponents of immigration are often heard saying, “fine, let people immigrate by all means, but they should do it the legal way.”

A fair response to this bromide would be: “What legal way?” As this article shows, for most low-skilled Mexican workers there is no legal way to enter the United States. The U.S. has a quota of 5,000 green cards for low-skilled workers; that’s just one percent of the number seeking to come in. For the rest, the alternative is a temporary work permit, but getting one of those “often requires the worker to ... pay off someone in Mexico.”

In short, there are Mexicans who want to work, and there are Americans who want to employ them, but the U.S. and (despite popular impressions) the Mexican governments have conspired to prevent, at gunpoint, these peaceful and mutually beneficial transactions.

In other news, I’m off to a joint Liberty Fund / Social Philosophy and Policy Center conference (topic: ancient political thought) in San Diego / La Jolla; back next week. I lived in San Diego in the early 70s, but haven’t seen it since 1977; it’ll be nice to see it again.

Posted June 13th, 2006
Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog06-06.htm#02
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Stromberg on Land Theft: Now Online

[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]

I’m back from Scotland! But more about that later.

Joseph Stromberg’s excellent 1995 article “English Enclosures and Soviet Collectivization: Two Instances of an Anti-Peasant Mode of Development,” which appeared in the first (and alas only) issue of Sam Konkin’s journal The Agorist Quarterly, has been getting some attention in the left-libertarian blogosphere lately (see, e.g., here and here). Stromberg explores the illuminating parallels between what are often thought of as very disparate events (since one is supposed to be a black mark for “capitalism” and the other for “socialism,” whatever exactly those terms mean).

I thought the article deserved a wider audience, particularly in light of the ongoing debate among libertarians concerning land reform and the “subsidy of history.” So with Stromberg’s kind permission, I’ve placed it online on the Molinari Institute site. Check it out here.

The other articles in that issue are worth reading also, so I’m going to try to get permission from the various authors to post the whole issue. Thus far I’ve gotten approval from E. Scott Royce and Jared C. Lobdell (for their articles “The Black Market Response to Rationing During World War II” and “Old Rightists and Old Writers,” respectively); waiting to hear from the others. Watch this space ....

Posted June 8th, 2006
Permalink: praxeology.net/unblog06-06.htm#01
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