Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

Variants of interventionism

At Secular Right Heather Mac Donald makes the following observation:

We are not moving from pure capitalism to pure socialism, we are moving from an already highly regulated, corporate- and individual-welfare-saturated economy to an even more regulated and redistributed economy.  (And we didn’t get to our welfare-saturated state without popular support for trying to minimize risk, [...]

Unfalsifiable achievements

William McGurn writes in the Wall Street Journal:

“Saved or created” has become the signature phrase for Barack Obama as he describes what his stimulus is doing for American jobs…However dubious it may be as an economic measure, as a political formula “save or create” allows the president to invoke numbers that convey an illusion [...]

Capitalist Counter-Revolution

Stimulus

Stimulating monkey brains

At Overcoming Bias Patri Friedman observes:
In the ancestral environment, pulling together to help the tribe in a time of crisis was the best way for an individual to survive.  In our modern environment, however, we are often led to identify with an entire nation as our “tribe”, and it turns out that this is an [...]

The political and the primitive

“The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes primitive again.”
Joseph Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy

The bell curve of individual choice

What is the relationship between individual choice and collective choice? What should be the domain over which a democracy chooses? Prevailing answers to these questions are an important factor affecting the size of government. One argument why imperfect foresight should favor limited government, or no government at all, involves the difference between how individual and [...]

Beyond politics

In the introduction to his collection of writings, Socratic Puzzles, Robert Nozick writes that  he never responded to the sizable literature on Anarchy, State and Utopia. His natural inclination would be to defend his views. As Nozick notes, “How could I learn that my views were mistaken if I thought about them always with defensive [...]

The addiction to politics

Can politics become an addiction? A more realistic question is to ask why politics is an addiction for so many people. The most straightforward answer would be that a compulsive interest in politics just reflects a natural preoccupation with advancing one’s interest (or that of others). But as was discussed in the previous installment, The [...]

The legacy of John Rawls

The Ludwig Von Mises Institute Senior Fellow, David Gordon, recently wrote an article on the legacy of the political philosopher John Rawls. In this piece, he discloses some interesting information about the relationship between John Rawls and Robert Nozick:
“In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, he had praised A Theory of Justice as a great work of [...]