The Study Guide now features banners with images, in the spirit of the Daily Article images, on all the Austrian Economics and Libertarian Studies topics as well as some of the most prolific authors. Just the thing if you’re writing a blog entry and want a link to the deep, hardcore literature on an Austro-libertarian topic. And what other serious, scholarly resource features a Talosian?

John Brätland’s article on “sustainable development” in the QJAE recently came online. I would like to use this as an opportunity not only to highlight this important article but also to point out some of the major Austrian work on environmental issues.

Brätland’s article (pdf) deals with the economic theory of intergenerational sustainability, more popularly known as “sustainable development”. The red flags pop up right away for Austrians with this description by a proponent:

Fundamentally, “sustainable development” is a notion of… disciplining our current consumption. This sense of “intergenerational responsibility” is a new political principle, a virtue that must now guide economic growth. The industrial world has already used so much of the planet’s ecological capital that the sustainability of the future is in doubt. That can’t continue.

Brätland’s basic strategy is to deploy insights from the calculation argument against the neoclassical theory of Robert Solow and others. A few suggestive quotes from Brätland will, I hope, pique your interest in this excellent article:

The concepts of valuation, capital, and income only take on valid or coherent meaning in the context of individual action, private property and market exchange… The critical goal of legitimate sustainability is to establish an expanded system of private property rights that allows the owners to manage resources as capital assets. (p. 21)

…the ethics underlying the acquisition of private property is not even acknowledged in the economics of intergenerational sustainability. The entire resource base of the world’s society is implicitly under the control of some government making allocative decisions. (p. 22)

Without private property, monetary exchange, and capital accounting, no rational economics of asset maintenance could exist… The extent that individual business plans may conflict and be incapable of mutual success creates a barrier to aggregation or “macro-reckoning.” Hence, society or a government as its agent has no aggregated measure of capital for which it can legitimately presume to make decisions. (pp. 28,29)

…public control of resources in the name of “sustainability” is not only contradictory but also self-defeating. (p. 41)

I have recently mentioned the insights of George Reisman on natural resources, (see especially Ch. 3 of Capitalism (large pdf)). These bear a striking similarity to the non-Austrian work of Julian Simon, especially in his book The Ultimate Resource. It may be of interest to note that in an e-mail exchange shortly before Simon died, he told me of his sympathy for the work of Mises and the Austrians.

Murray Rothbard’s main contribution to this topic was his paper Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution (pdf). There he extended his analysis on these matters enough to note the following in a 1985 preface to For a New Liberty: “Of my writings since [1978], the most relevant in expanding or developing ideas in this book have been The Ethics of Liberty… and ‘Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution,’ which partially alters and develops my views on pollution law and the function of law generally.”

Finally, Roy Cordato laid out the basis for a comprehensive approach to this topic in his 2004 QJAE article Toward an Austrian Theory of Environmental Economics (pdf). Here he argues that “by bringing together Austrian concepts of costs and the praxeological foundations of economics we discover a unique perspective on pollution and the role of property rights in solving environmental problems. Furthermore by placing environmental problems within the context of personal and interpersonal plan formulation, we discover that they are not about the environment per se but about the resolution of human conflict.” (p. 3)

I have gathered Austrian resources on the environment in the Study Guide subject Natural Sciences and the Environment. If you know of an Austrian piece on this topic that isn’t included please let me know.

It took a while, but I have now categorized all the articles from 30 years of the Journal of Libertarian Studies, from the first Winter 1977 issue to the latest issue that just came out last week. This project involved creating a whole new set of subjects for the largely non-economic articles of the JLS. These “Libertarian Studies” subjects are listed below.

Going through the over 300 articles of the JLS has been a real pleasure. I plan to highlight some of these articles as well as other treasures of the Study Guide in upcoming Study Guide Classic posts.

With the full integration of the JLS archive into the Study Guide, this database now more fully represents the broad nature of the Austrian school which has long asserted that the study of human action yields insight far beyond the study of commerce.

Libertarian Studies

• Philosophical Foundations
• Political Philosophy
• Property
• History
• Law
• Anarchy
• State Theory
• Intellectual History
• Religion and Politics
• Austrian Methodology for the Social Sciences
• Strategy
• Sociology
• Literature and the Arts
• Medicine, Psychology and Psychiatry
• War and Foreign Policy
• Education
• Natural Sciences and the Environment

A handy feature was recently added to the Austrian Study Guide. Most entries now have a “Related” section. For example:

The Related section is useful in two ways. First, it tells you at a glance how we’ve classified the item. This can help you to quickly home in on the resources that fit your needs. It is also particularly helpful when an article deals with a topic that you might not have guessed. For example, you wouldn’t suspect from the title of this article (“Quod Omnes Tangit…”) on consent theory in the Middle Ages that it is related to the topic of Anarchy but the “Related” topics reveal this.

But there is also this. The related topics are links. Click on the Related topic “Property” in the entry above and you will see other Study Guide entries on Property: articles, books, audio and video. With these Related links the Study Guide now gets that essential feature of a Web resource: surfability. At any point in the Study Guide you can click on an author name to see all items by that author, or click on a related topic to see all items on that topic. Rinse and repeat. A search that starts in one place can lead you to unexpected places. You don’t need to know exactly where an item is in the Study Guide, just start surfing and you’ll find your way there.

Alfred G. Cuzán contributed “Do We Ever Really Get Out of Anarchy?” (pdf) to the Summer 1979 issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies, an article which Roderick Long describes as “invaluable”, (also see Stephan Kinsella). This short article, only 7 pages of text, is one of those little pieces of conceptual dynamite that blows apart the way you’ve seen the world.

Cuzán challenges the notion that we are ever really under “Government” if what Government means is a “third party” external to all relations in society. He points out that “such a ‘third party’ arrangement for society is non-existent among those who exercise the power of government themselves.” (p. 152) Therefore “whereas without government it was market or natural anarchy, it is now a political anarchy, an anarchy inside power.” (pp. 152-3) Cuzán goes on to explain that not all these political anarchies are created equal. Some are more violent than others. The least violent political anarchies begin to look more and more like market anarchy… So wouldn’t outright market anarchy be the least violent of all? Read the whole thing.

For more on this topic see the Anarchy subject. This is part of the new Libertarian Studies category of the Study Guide which I have been creating to categorize the large amount of non-economic libertarian literature in the Study Guide.