All Posts Tagged With: "virtue"

Wanted: A Healthy Dose of Humility

An awful lot of people in this world are really puffed up about themselves. One of the character traits I wish were much more widely practiced these days is good old-fashioned humility. T. S. Eliot said, “Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well [...]

30Nov2011 | Lawrence W. Reed | 5 comments | Continued

Dusting Off a Man and His Classic

In 1870 the sultan of Turkey gave a book by a Scotsman to his entire entourage of top-ranking officials. The Khedive of Egypt had the same work inscribed and painted on the wall of the Royal harem. Two years later the Meiji dynasty ordered the book to be issued throughout Tokyo’s school system. Eventually every prefecture [...]

21Sep2011 | Lawrence W. Reed | 1 comment | Continued

From Good Samaritan to Robin Hood

The clamor from interventionists against inequality morphs into a clamor for a larger and larger state. This path leads to the loss of liberty and a distortion of both democracy and justice. It distorts democracy because, by attempting to solve inequality, it removes limits to power and expands the field of state action. It distorts justice because the only way to solve inequality politically is for the state to have the power to treat individuals unequally. Thus the struggle to eliminate inequality ends up destroying the most important form of equality for an open society: equality before the law.

10Jun2009 | Carlos Rodríguez Braun | 2 comments | Continued

Warriors and Merchants

In 1915 the well-known German economic historian Werner Sombart published a book with the arresting title Merchants and Heroes. It argued that the war then underway between the Central Powers and the Entente was not just a traditional great-power conflict. It was rather a struggle between two different worldviews embodied by France and Britain on [...]

1Nov2005 | Stephen Davies | 0 comments | Continued

Freedom and Virtue: The Conservative/Libertarian Debate

Libertarians and conservatives seem to want to get along; how else explain this book’s existence? It was published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a now-conservative organization founded by libertarian journalist Frank Chodorov as the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists. What happened when Chodorov passed control of his organization to more conservative characters is emblematic of the [...]

1Dec1999 | Brian Doherty | 0 comments | Continued

The Market and Political Freedom

John Marangos teaches in the department of economics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. This article is adapted from “Market and Political Freedom” in D. Kartarelis, ed., Business & Economics for the 21st Century, proceedings of the Business and Economics Society International Conference, Athens, Greece, July 18–22, 1997, volume I. The author wishes to thank [...]

1Jun1999 | John Marangos | 2 comments | Continued

Social Cooperation, Good Intentions, and Incentives

(Editor’s Note: This is the first installment of Professor Lee’s new monthly column.) Although each of my Freeman columns will stand alone, let me emphasize at the outset that economics is far more than a series of unrelated concepts. Economics provides a coherent and powerful framework for seeing order in the seemingly unrelated actions of [...]

1May1998 | Dwight R. Lee | 0 comments | Continued

The Perversity of Doing Good at Others’ Expense

Assume your 45-year-old friend is critically ill and will die by tomorrow morning unless something extraordinary is done. Miraculously, it becomes possible for you to save your friend. But to do so you have to shorten the lives of all other Americans by a small amount. By taking away ten seconds of life from someone [...]

1Sep1997 | Dwight R. Lee | 1 comment | Continued

Perspectives on Capitalism and Freedom

Dr. Younkins is professor of accountancy and business administration at Wheeling Jesuit University, Wheeling, West Virginia. Capitalism and freedom are inseparable. In our society we believe that human beings, merely by virtue of being human, possess the capacity to exercise freedom and the right to do so. Each person should be free to own property, [...]

1Dec1996 | Edward W. Younkins | 0 comments | Continued

The Virtues of Free Speech

Mr. Turiano is a graduate student in philosophy at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Any persuasive argument for liberty must involve a connection between liberty and human excellence. The reason for this is clear. An argument for liberty is an argument for its goodness. The ultimate context for all human evaluation of good news is human [...]

1Sep1996 | Mark Turiano | 0 comments | Continued

Liberty and Responsibility: Inseparable Ideals

Dr. More is president of Extropy Institute in Marina Del Rey, California. He may be reached at more@extropy.org. The founders of the American political and economic system felt a burning desire to establish a country of unprecedented liberty. Many of those who endured the arduous journey to the New World left behind religious oppression and [...]

1Jul1996 | Max More | 6 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

In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays

Dr. Dennis is Senior Program Officer at Liberty Fund, Inc., in Indianapolis. In 1962, Frank S. Meyer, then Senior Editor at National Review, published his small, but controversial tract, In Defense of Freedom: A Conservative Credo (Henry Regnery). Here Meyer argued that what American conservatives had to conserve was largely an Anglo-American tradition of liberty. [...]

1May1996 | William C. Dennis | 0 comments | Continued

Freedom and Happiness

“[F]reedom is undoubtedly the indispensable condition, without which even the pursuits most congenial to individual human nature can never succeed in producing such salutary influences. Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter his very being, but still remains alien to his [...]

1Jan1996 | Bryan Caplan | 0 comments | Continued

Two Directions at Once

Mr. Read is President of the Foundation for Economic Education. We are going in two directions at once,” observed Henry Hazlitt. His subsequent explanation of this statement squared precisely with my own observations. So far as the millions are concerned, socialism is more agreeably accepted today than yesterday, a year ago, a decade ago, or [...]

1Oct1956 | Leonard E. Read | 0 comments | Continued

Legislated Security Is Bondage

Excerpts from an address, December 5, 1916, The “grand old man” of labor—president of the AFL, 1886-1924—warned his union members to look behind the humanitarian slogans used by the advocates of government-guaranteed security There has never yet come down from any government any substantial improvement in the conditions of the masses of the people, unless [...]

1Sep1955 | Samuel Gompers | 0 comments | Continued

Loyalty Oaths

Is there any logic in passing a law which states that one person must be loyal to another person? Isn’t that about the same thing as threatening to use force to make one person love another person? Can it be done? Our government now demands that its citizens in various capacities swear that they will [...]

1May1955 | Leonard E. Read | 0 comments | Continued

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