Mises and Popper on Action
2024-01-02
Many years ago, in “The Communist Road to Self-Enslavement” (included in After the Open Society, a collection of Karl Popper’s papers edited by Jeremy Shearmur), I discovered the following sentence: “Like myself, [Ludwig von Mises] appreciated that there was some common ground, and he knew that I had accepted his most fundamental theorems and that I greatly admired him for these.”
As I respect both Popper and Mises as great thinkers, although thinkers who had differences, I was surprised. To be sure, in the paragraph containing the above sentence, Popper does discuss their differences, and then there is Mises’s disagreement with Popper in The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, where he writes in bold language,
If one accepts the terminology of logical positivism and especially also
Privatizing Roads Solves the Problem of Road Closures
2024-01-01
While traveling recently, I was stuck in a terrible bout of traffic. Unbeknownst to me, West Virginia University’s fall graduation just ended, and I was caught in the middle of the seemingly endless stream of parents, relatives, and friends who were leaving the ceremony. To deal with this problem, the City of Morgantown closed down lanes and reserved them for exclusive use by graduation attendees. Though the city may have done a fine job handling traffic, this raises an interesting question: How would road closures be handled in a free market?
One thing is clear: the government would not have the authority to shut down roads. The example provided above may not be the worst case of government management, but one can easily think of others. Roads are shut down all the time for renovations.
A Message from Tom DiLorenzo: Help Us in Our Fight to Save Freedom in America
2023-12-29
Please help us in our fight to save freedom in America—and indeed the rest of the world—by making as generous a donation as you can.
I became a student of Austrian economics and libertarian philosophy by accident. In my first semester in college in 1972, I signed up for Principles of Microeconomics. In the classroom was a bookshelf that happened to have all the back issues of The Freeman published by the Foundation for Economic Education. I started reading some of the articles—by Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Henry Hazlitt, Gary North, Israel Kirzner, William Hutt, and other free-market writers—and I was hooked! I decided then that I wanted to be like these brave, highly educated, and articulate men who were so devoted to the cause of a free society.
Those were the old