All Posts Tagged With: "social order"

Drug Decriminalization Has Failed?

Michael Gerson, former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and now a columnist for the Washington Post, has denounced libertarianism as “morally empty,” “anti-government,” “a scandal,” “an idealism that strangles mercy,” guilty of “selfishness,” “rigid ideology,” and “rigorous ideological coldness.” (He’s starting to repeat himself.) In his May 9 column, “Ron Paul’s Land of Second-Rate [...]

24Aug2011 | David Boaz | 7 comments | Continued

Visible and Invisible Hands

Douglas Den Uyl is vice president of educational programs for Liberty Fund. Douglas Rasmussen is a professor of philosophy at St. John’s University . They co-wrote Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics (Pennsylvania State University Press). It has often been said that markets are led “as if by an invisible hand” to [...]

1Apr2007 | Douglas B. Rasmussen | 2 comments | Continued

The Function of The Freeman

On the positive side, of course, our function is to expound and apply our announced principles of traditional liberalism, voluntary cooperation, and individual freedom. On the negative side, it is to expose the errors of coercionism and collectivism of all degrees—of statism,“planning,” controlism, socialism, fascism, and communism. We seek, in other words, not only to [...]

1Jan2006 | Henry Hazlitt | 0 comments | Continued

Bastiat, Socialism, and the Blank Slate

“It is evident,” the French economist and parliamentarian Frédéric Bastiat wrote a century and a half ago, “that the socialists set out in quest of an artificial social order only because they deemed the natural order to be either bad or inadequate; and they deemed it bad or inadequate only because they felt that men’s [...]

1Jun2003 | James Peron | 1 comment | Continued

Liberty, Property, and Crime

No society can long exist in a climate of rampant crime, especially if it is properly defined as any act that violates the life, liberty, or property of another. and when the term “crime” is used, that is generally what people mean. Of course many people, perhaps most, would also include victimless crimes such as [...]

1Nov2001 | James Peron | 1 comment | Continued

Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms by Diane Ravitch

Simon & Schuster · 2000 · 555 pages · $30.00 Reviewed by Robert Holland In his 1996 book, The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them, E.D. Hirsch categorized and then proceeded to demolish the doctrines of progressive education that hold American education in thrall. Hirsch exposed the intellectual shallowness behind such notions [...]

1Sep2001 | Robert Holland | 0 comments | Continued

Individualism in Modern Thought from Adam Smith to Hayek

Some social theorists believe that moral, political, and economic order must be imposed according to some central plan. In their view, only constant management can generate and sustain the complex, mutually supportive norms of advanced societies. Another tradition in social thought defends an “open society” one founded on respect for voluntarism and individual freedom. Thinkers [...]

1Dec1999 | Andrew I. Cohen | 1 comment | Continued

Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action: A 50th Anniversary Appreciation

Fifty years ago, on September 14, 1949, Yale University Press released a major new work—Human Action by the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises.[1] The following week, in his regular Newsweek column, Henry Hazlitt referred to this book as “a landmark in the progress of economics. . . . Human Action is, in short, at once [...]

1Sep1999 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued

Spontaneous Order

Nigel Ashford is senior lecturer in politics at the University of Staffordshire in England and coauthor of A Dictionary of Conservative and Libertarian Thought (Routledge, 1991). This article is adapted from his paper “Principles for a Free Society,” a primer for former communist countries. Reprinted by permission of the Jarl Hjalmarson Foundation of Stockholm. “Many [...]

1Jul1999 | Nigel Ashford | 19 comments | Continued

Educational Savior?

Daniel Hager is a freelance writer in Lansing, Michigan. George S. Counts is not a widely recognized figure in twentieth-century American education, but he was extremely influential. Twenty-five years after his death, the damage caused by this one-time president of the American Federation of Teachers lives on. The first step in counteracting his effects is [...]

1Jun1999 | Daniel Hager | 1 comment | Continued

Coercivists and Voluntarists

Categorizing a political position according to some simple left-right scale of values leaves something to be desired. Political views cover such a wide variety of issues that it is impossible to describe adequately any one person merely by identifying where he sits on a lone horizontal line. Use of the single left-right scale makes impossible [...]

1Aug1997 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 4 comments | Continued

Alexis de Tocqueville: How People Gain Liberty and Lose It

Alexis de Tocqueville was a gentleman-scholar who emerged as one of the world’s great prophets. More than a century and a half ago, when most people were ruled by kings, he declared that the future belonged to democracy. He explained what was needed for democracy to work and how it could help protect human liberty. At the same time, he warned that a welfare state could seduce people into servitude. He saw why socialism must lead to slavery.

1Jul1996 | Jim Powell | 0 comments | Continued

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