From the reader poll, we received a large stack of nominations for the best Mises.org articles of 2004. We were persuaded by readers to exclude Mises, Rothbard, and Menger from the list, if only to make it less unfair. The nominations were vast and wide-ranging but the following emerged again and again:
Top 15 Daily Articles:
- Ten Recurring Economic Fallacies, 1774-2004 by H.A. Scott Trask
- The Monetary Economics of Thurston Howell III by B.K. Marcus
- Economics: Vocation or Profession? by Joseph Salerno
- To Be an Austrian: A Primer by Sean Corrigan
- What’s Wrong with Monopoly (the game)? by Benjamin Powell
- Capital Exports and Free Trade by J.G. Hülsmann
- A Nobel Prize for Not Much by Frank Shostak
- Do Food Makers Want to Kill You? by Lew Rockwell
- Economics, Philosophy, and Politics by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
- 100 Years of Medical Robbery by Dale Steinreich
- Is Laissez-Faire a Threat to Freedom? An Answer to George Soros by George Reisman
- Can Markets Predict Elections? by B.K. Marcus
- Markets, Not Unions, Gave us Leisure by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
- Experimental Economics, Indeed by Joseph Stromberg
- What Does Marginality Mean? by Robert Murphy, tied with Convicted for Fearing by Ilana Mercer
Top five Journal articles
- Public Goods and Private Solutions in Maritime History by Larry Sechrest (QJAE)
- The Constitutional Right of Secession in Political Theory and History by Andrei Kreptul (JLS)
- On the Optimum Quantity of Money by William Barnett and Walter Block (QJAE)
- The Forgotten Contribution: Murray Rothbard on Socialism in Theory and in Practice by Peter Boettke and Christopher Coyne (QJAE)
- Do Pessimistic Assumptions about Human Behavior Justify Government? By Benjamin Powell and Christopher Coyne (JLS)
Congratulations to all. If your favorite is not listed, please post in the comment section of this post.
{ 3 comments }
What’s funny is that a statement in the #2 daily article directly conflicts with the conclusions of the #3 journal article:
From the #2 daily article:
“As Mises claimed, any fixed amount of money is the correct amount of money for a given economy.”
Journal article #5 is great. I have been wondering about social contract theory myself lately, and this article helped me to understand more about the fallaciousness of it. However, there is one thing that I believe that is lacking in this article, and it is something that I have been wondering about. Perhaps someone else out there could shed some light on this matter.
One section of the article is entitled: “Can a Social Contract Work in a Hobbesian World?” I think another question before this one must be asked first, and that is: Can a social contract even be created in a Hobbesian World? What I am having difficulty in understanding is how a society in a Hobbesian “state of nature” can suddenly develop a government and emerge from that state of nature without a fundamental change in the supposed condition of that nature. The problem that I see with this article is that it automatically jumps from discussing the stateless society to discussing a society with a social contract. However, this disregards the intermediary process that must take place first and in my opinion is giving those who it critiques too much.
Before a society can go from the state of nature to a society bound by a social contract, the majority of that society must agree to obey the social contract enforced by newly appointed government officials, since government cannot exist on brute force alone, it must have majority support. The problem here is that before the government officials have majority support they are just like anyone else in the Hobbesian jungle and according to the analysis of Buchanan they are unable to make agreements when there are numerous anonymous individuals in the society. If people wanted to get out of and did get out of the Hobbesian jungle because life in it was “nasty, brutish and short,” then there would have had to have been a fundamental change in their agreement making ability, in which Buchanan’s analysis no longer applied. However, if Buchanan’s analysis no longer applied, then people would be able to make agreements with large numbers of anonymous people without a state.
Shostak should have at least 5 in the Top 15 Daily Articles.
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