In a clever post on his blog for June 21, 2011, Brad DeLong offered a reconstruction of Robert Nozick’s political philosophy. He claimed that “to successfully explain Nozickian political philosophy is face the reality that it is self-parody.” Hence only liberals like himself could explain it, because anyone who grasps the structure of the argument would at once see that he could no longer be a Nozickian believer. Why only liberals in DeLong’s sense could perceive the problems he finds in Nozick’s argument, he does not tell us; but let this pass.

DeLong is not quite so clever as he takes himself to be, at least when he leaves his own field; and his account of Nozick contains several mistakes. He attributes to Nozick the bizarre view that no one can ever justifiably advance a utilitarian or consequentialist argument. So enamored is he of this attribution that three of the fourteen steps of his reconstruction of Nozick’s argument refer to this claim. Of course, Nozick never supported this odd position. His point was rather than rights have moral weight that appeals to consequences do not override. The question is not whether consequences matter—obviously, they do—but whether anything else does as well.

Not content with his silly error, DeLong saddles Nozick with the view that “Something becomes mine if I make it.” Nozick did not embrace so broad a principle as this: as DeLong states it, the principle would imply that parents own their children, and Nozick certainly does not think this. Nozick’s attempt to arrive at a principle of initial acquisition is restricted to acquisition of unowned resources, and Nozick never succeeds in formulating such a principle to his own satisfaction. DeLong’s premise is an absurd oversimplification.

DeLong also fails to understand Nozick’s account of the Lockean proviso. He correctly notes that once everything is owned, latecomers can no longer take from the common stock of nature. If the Lockean proviso requires that they can do so, it cannot in this circumstance be fulfilled; and people’s property titles cease to be valid. DeLong then says, without explanation, that the Lockean proviso then shows that all previous acts of appropriation are invalid, “since they did not leave enough for the latecomers to take as much as they wanted from the common stock of nature.”

Here DeLong has botched the argument. He does not explain how Nozick gets from the step that property titles are invalid once nothing is left for latecomers to the stronger claim that all property titles are invalid. Before everything is owned, it need not be true that acts of appropriation fail to leave enough for latecomers; or so it at first sight appears. On DeLong’s account, Nozick’s argument contains a glaring gap. DeLong fails to mention the backwards induction argument that Nozick uses to fill this gap; perhaps DeLong thinks that the requirement that the steps of an argument be logically justified is of minor importance.

DeLong thinks that Nozick gave up the Lockean proviso once he realized that it would eliminate titles to property. The tenth step of the reconstruction is “Oops”. He does not see that Nozick’s point that even those without property are better off under a system of private property than in a state of nature without the institution of private property is intended as an interpretation of the proviso, not a replacement for it.

I attempted to post a comment on DeLong’s blog about these mistakes, but DeLong has not seen fit to print it. He evidently prefers posters who celebrate his brilliance. As Pope said of Addison, he sits “attentive to his own applause; While Wits and Templars ev’ry sentence raise, And wonder with a foolish face of praise.”

I highly recommend Terrance Tomkow’s Retributive Ethics to anyone interested in new approaches to ethics. Tomkow discusses with great insight a number of issues central to libertarianism, including self-defense and property rights. He holds that we have no positive moral duties and on this basis assails Peter Singer’s influential contention that we ought to donate substantial parts of our income to relieve world poverty.

I’ve decided to change one of the lecture topics in my forthcoming course, “Mises’s Epistemology.” Ayn Rand had a very different approach to epistemology from Mises, and she criticized him explicitly. I’ll discuss these criticisms and go over the major differences between Mises and Rand. This lecture will replace Lecture 4: “Mises and Max Weber.” The material I planned to cover in that lecture will be shifted to the three earlier lectures.

Lowell Harriss, a distinguished economist who was for many years a professor at Columbia University, died last December at the age of 97. Harriss was a good friend of the Mises Institute and presented a paper about Mises on Taxation at the Austrian Scholars Conference in 1996. His specialty was public finance, and Murray Rothbard cited his work on the bad effects of an income tax. He was a warm, friendly person, and I valued greatly the encouraging notes I sometimes received from him about my reviews. For many years, I would get a thick envelope from him, stuffed with his favorite cartoons. As the old phrase has it, he was a gentleman and a scholar.

I met Antony Flew at a Mises Institute conference in 2001. He did not share the admiration common among philosophers for John Rawls. For him, The Theory of Justice was a travesty: Rawls’s failure to define justice until late in the book especially upset him. His vehemence, combined as it was with great charm, made an unforgettable impression. After my own talk, also an attack on Rawls, I said to him, “You’ll probably say I was too easy on Rawls.” “Well, you were rather”, he replied.

Readers of this blog will probably know Flew best for his trenchant books and essays in defense of classical liberalism, such as Equality in Liberty and Justice; but political philosophy was only one of his many interests. He was one of the foremost ordinary language philosophers. Like his teacher Gilbert Ryle, he thought that philosophical problems often stemmed from “systematically misleading expressions.” He applied his great skill at clarification of concepts to a wide variety of topics, including personal identity, causation, free will, psychoanalysis, and ESP. He was also an outstanding philosophical scholar and one of the world’s foremost authorities on David Hume. He was probably most famous for his defense of atheism, a position he came to abandon in his last years. In part, his volte face was due to the influence of David Conway, whose The Rediscovery of Wisdom had much impressed him. His willingness to abandon a view held for decades because he thought that reason required this showed his great intellectual courage.

It is not often that Paul Samuelson and Paul Krugman are indicted for lack of fidelity to Keynes, but this is exactly Paul Davidson’s complaint against them. He says they have been untrue to Keynes’s radical vision. FULL ARTICLE

Jan Narveson is one of the best contemporary moral and political philosophers, and it is not surprising that his introduction to political philosophy raises a vital issue that most people miss. FULL ARTICLE

Garrett did not ignore the moral dimension. For him, the preservation of America as an independent civilization was a categorical imperative. A worldwide crusade against evil could not succeed and would put in peril our unique contribution to the world. FULL ARTICLE

Professor Hans Hoppe, in his outstanding new introduction to the reissue of The Ethics of Liberty, hits the nail on the head. He contrasts Murray Rothbard with Robert Nozick, a much more famous figure among academic philosophers and political theorists. Although both writers embrace libertarianism (Nozick much less ardently or consistently than Rothbard), their styles of thinking differ entirely. Nozick, according to Hoppe, is impressionistic and given to flights of fancy. Rothbard, by contrast, reasons by strict deduction from self-evident axioms.

Agree with him or not on Nozick, no one can dispute the accuracy of Professor Hoppe’s characterization of Rothbard. FULL ARTICLE

A great many people have learned from Mises and Rothbard, but Lew Rockwell belongs to a much more select class: he has developed their thought in an original way. FULL ARTICLE

No doubt the depredations of the state are an ever-present menace, but how can we possibly get along without this institution? Would not a stateless libertarian community easily fall prey to the first state that chose to attack it? FULL ARTICLE

The reader of this, the second volume of Rothbard’s last great work, will at once face a puzzle: how was one person able to unify so vast a mass of material into a tightly organized narrative? I cannot pretend to provide a full answer, but one part of the solution lies in the fact that Rothbard follows a few main themes with iron consistency. FULL ARTICLE

Murray Rothbard tells us that his gigantic, two-volume work was first envisioned as a “standard Smith-to-the-present moderately sized book, a sort of contra-[Robert] Heilbroner” (p. xv). When we see what has emerged from that plan, a parallel at once springs to mind: Cervantes began Don Quixote as a short story, but he gradually expanded it into one of the great books of the world. Likewise, this “moderately sized book” has become one of the great intellectual enterprises of our age. Indeed, the following review discusses only the first volume.

For Rothbard, the history of economics has an unusually broad scope. To him it includes not only economic theory, but virtually all of intellectual history as well. As he often did in conversation, Murray Rothbard here advances definite and well-thought-out interpretations of major historical controversies. FULL ARTICLE

Ron Paul has waged a heroic battle for financial sanity since the inception of his tenure in Congress; and in End the Fed he gives us insights from that struggle available nowhere else. Dr. Paul had an affinity for the free market from an early age. FULL REVIEW

Professor Reisman centers his enormous book on a key insight: it is capitalists themselves who run the capitalist system. As I will show, this insight enables him to bring out a vital aspect of Austrian economics, essential to a grasp of that system of thought. FULL REVIEW

Why is The Real Lincoln so much superior to Harry Jaffa’s A New Birth of Freedom? Jaffa offers a purely textual study: as if he were dealing with Aristotle or Dante, he considers every nuance he can discover or manufacture in Lincoln’s speeches. Professor DiLorenzo follows an entirely different course. He compares Lincoln’s words with what he actually did, and the result is a historical rather than a mythological figure. FULL ARTICLE

In the course of his discussion of autism, Cowen makes a contribution that readers of The Mises Review will find of great value. He has given us a penetrating and subtle criticism of the use of behavioral economics to support government intervention in the economy. FULL ARTICLE

This anthology of John Gray’s work over the past thirty years enables us to answer a question that has puzzled many people. What went wrong with John Gray?

When I first met him in 1979, he was a forceful and erudite advocate of classical liberalism; Murray Rothbard viewed him fondly, intrigued that an Oxford political theorist sympathized with libertarianism. In the years since then, unfortunately, Gray’s peregrinations have taken him to a position that has little use for human beings. What happened?

The present volume makes it clear that Gray has retained much of his classical liberalism. He provides an outstanding account of Hayek, bringing out the essentials of Hayek’s criticism of socialism and interventionism. FULL ARTICLE

There are two ways to read Mises’s great treatise. Most readers will, I fear, find the book too much to attempt to grasp systematically. Not everyone feels like reading a 900-page book straight through. If you shrink from a full confrontation with the book, you will, as I hope to show, miss out on a great deal. But all is not lost. You can open the book almost anywhere and come away with new insights. FULL ARTICLE

Our author explains the main reason in great detail. A central banking system vastly increases the ability of bankers to lend more money than they possess in reserves. Absent central control, monetary expansion in a fractional reserve system faces limits. If a bank, desiring to increase its profits, expands too much, rival banks will call in its notes. If it cannot meet its obligations, it will collapse. A central banking system removes this obstacle.

The House of Morgan was by no means the first group in American history to seek the ill-gotten gains of centralized banking. FULL ARTICLE