Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

Barack Obama: Authoritarian

The surprising defeat of the Democrats in the recent Massachusetts elections has unleashed a great number of opinion pieces about the  mistakes of the Obama administration. A common theme in these articles is that the Obama administration fails to recognize that the United States is a right-of-center nation that consistently rejects the far-left / progressive  [...]

The useless Constitution

Lysander Spooner expert and legal scholar Randy Barnett argues that Obamacare is unconstitutional. It does not seem likely that such an argument will prevail. Over the course of American history it has become clear that the Constitution presents little obstacle to a changing political climate. This makes the Constitution basically useless. When the prevailing political [...]

The ruling class

In an engaging piece about the lack of ideological diversity in American theater Harry Stein makes the following perceptive observation:
Like liberals everywhere, its creators imagine they’re speaking truth to power—when, in fact, they are the power, and guard it as jealously as any of the right-wing, American-allied dictators of yore they grew up protesting against.
One [...]

Libertarian centralism

“Centralization is ordinarily a sign of social decadence.” Russell Kirk
From a “skeptical empiricist” perspective (to use  Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s useful phrase) neither “rationalist”  nor public policy approaches to libertarianism are particularly credible.  But what is quite remarkable about current debates about “libertarian centralism” is that libertarians associated with rationalist schools of thought (Austrian economics, natural [...]

A conversation with Anthony de Jasay

Karl Popper’s authoritarian social technologies

Karl Popper is known for his influential contributions to the philosophy of science and critical rationalism.  Unfortunately, his attempt to apply critical rationalism to political philosophy produced writings of a more impatient and dubious nature. For example, in 1960 Popper wrote:

..the empiricist’s questions ‘How do you know? What is the source of your assertion?’ are [...]

Barack Obama versus Michael Bakunin

There are great expectations about the ability of academics to shape society by “smart” policies. The anarchist Michael Bakunin had not much useful to say about economics but he was a realistic observer of intellectuals and power:

Suppose a learned academy, composed of the most illustrious representatives of science; suppose this academy charged with legislation for [...]

The consequentialist consensus

Don Boudreaux writes:

It’s no ethical challenge to support something that works.  It is, however, a real ethical challenge to oppose something that you believe would work.  Someone opposed as a matter of principle to government intervention into the economy might be sensible or not; but if that person sticks by his or her principles — [...]

Pavlov’s dogs of stimulus

In his latest column “To Spend or Not to Spend,” Anthony de Jasay discusses the current plans to borrow and spend our way out of economic recession. A central place in such policy proposals is taken by the renewed enthusiasm for Keynesian economics, a school of economic thinking that appears to have been formulated for [...]

Taking Paul Krugman seriously

Robert Higgs on Paul Krugman

Krugman obviously subscribes to the belief, immensely popular inside the beltway, that all the money rightfully belongs to the government, whether it is being considered for involuntary transfer from its private holders to the government or being considered for retention by the people who earned it in the first place. He [...]

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