At the APEE conference next month in Las Vegas, I will be presenting “The Evolution of the Mixed Economy – A Schematic Approach.” My talk integrates themes from several major thinkers from whom I have learned a great deal: Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and Gordon Tullock. […]
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[This is Section 40 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.] Part 8. Conclusion: Nazi and Anti-Nazi Philosophies 40. Hindsight and future resolve We know from historical hindsight that it took a world war to defeat the Nazis. Tens of millions of human beings died in that war. Actual human beings who lived, loved, cried, had dreams—and
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I’ll be giving a talk on Friday, March 12 to the Houston Property Rights Association on the topic of “Entrepreneurship, Politics, and Ayn Rand”: “Why are business success and free markets so unpopular in some quarters? There are lots of reasons. One is that business is seen as immoral or boring or both. For the
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The Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship has produced a monograph version of Timothy Sandefur’s To Pursue and Obtain Happiness and Safety, now available at cost at Amazon. In the monograph, Sandefur discusses economic liberty’s up-and-down legal fortunes, as the American founders’ original protections of productive freedom, property and contract rights came under attack during the
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In addition to the session on Ethics and the Financial Crisis, I am chairing a session on the theme of “Reason in Hayek and Rand” for the Association for Private Enterprise Education conference to be held April 11-13, 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The rationale for the session: Two giants of twentieth-century thought — but
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At this year’s APEE conference, I am chairing a session on “Ethics and the Financial Crisis.” The rationale for the session: Many conferences and debates are focusing on the economics and politics of the crisis, but much less attention is being focused on the core ethics issues involved. Here are the participants and the titles
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A formal publication of my “Defending Shylock: Productive Work in Financial Markets” is forthcoming this spring. For now, here is a draft version [pdf] of the sixteen-page essay. From the Introduction: “Ambivalent attitudes about financial markets are as old as financial markets themselves. Plato, in The Republic (555e), condemns moneylenders. Jesus threw the money lenders
My colleagues in the Department of Philosophy, Shawn Klein and Matthew Flamm, will be leading a reading group on Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Adam Smith is best known as an economist and a critic of mercantilism and as an early advocate of market economies. Less well known is Smith the moral philosopher.
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