Thomas Hill Green, an eighteenth-century English philosopher, didn't believe it was possible to have a good society without a powerful state. David Gordon explains why Green’s argument fails to impress.
Original Article: Why Society Doesn't Need the State
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2023-11-03
Critics of the free market often aim at the wrong target. They assail the market for “failures” that are actually the result of government intervention in the economy. In this week’s column, I’d like to discuss an example of this mistake in Angus Deaton’s Economics in America (Princeton, 2023).
Deaton was the winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for economics, about which he says:
As many previous recipients have reported, the experience is both exhilarating and overwhelming. I often think of the story of the dog that liked to chase buses but had little idea of what it would be like to catch one. The Nobel is not just catching the bus but being run over by it. Over and over again.
As you will have gathered, Deaton is very funny. In a section of the book called “Trying to Be a Good Hip-Op
2023-11-01
Bloomberg reports that price inflation in Turkey was more than 60 percent in September. The 61.5 percent reading was released by the Turkish government’s statistical office. Being on the ground in Turkey for Hans-Hermann and Gülçin Hoppe’s Property and Freedom Society meeting, I can say the vibe was not hyperinflationary. The shelves are not empty and the port city of Bodrum is booming. Professor Hoppe told the crowd Bodrum has grown from a population of fifty thousand to a million for the whole peninsula. No matter the destruction to the Turkish lira, money keeps pouring into peninsula real estate, watercraft, and businesses.
“According to statistics by the Turkish Statistical Institute, the average property price in Bodrum in 2021 was around $490 per square foot,” wrote Spencer Elliott
2023-10-30
The State is an organized crime racket. It appropriates wealth by coercion and regularly uses force in violation of the n0n-aggression principle. The State is a parasite that perpetuates itself at all costs and extends itself by any means possible. Regardless of its putative leaders, the State grows and increases its power at the expense of its hosts and others who fall victim to its predations.
As Hans-Hermann Hoppe poignantly wrote, States are “gangs of murderers, plunderers and thieves, surrounded by willing executioners, propagandists, sycophants, crooks, liars, clowns, charlatans, dupes and useful idiots—[the State is] an institution that dirties and taints everything it touches.”
One of the State’s dirty occupations is war. When undertaking war, the State uses expropriated wealth and
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