Property and freedom

Frank van Dun has an interesting article on “hostile encirclement” in a libertarian world. His thesis is: when freedom and property rights conflict, the latter should give way to the former. There may be cases where there is a conflict between claims on behalf of one person’s freedom and claims on behalf of another person’s [...]

The egoist

I was intrigued by the buzz surrounding Jennifer Burns’ book on Rand (the first chapter can be downloaded from Amazon [pdf]) and headed over to Google Books to see what it was all about. What was her opinion on Mises given the fact that he was a Kantian in metaphysics and epistemology, and a utilitarian [...]

Envy

I don’t read tabloids regularly; perusing the daily “mainstream” newspapers is a masochistic enterprise in itself. Happened to read the Mirror today, and found N. Vittal’s article- Close on the heels of the austerity drive of the Congress leaders, Salman Khurshid, the minister for corporate affairs, came up with advice to companies to refrain from [...]

“De­mocracy too is not divine”

I noticed this phrase because someone was searching for it. Its from Mises’ Omnipotent Government- The state is essentially an apparatus of compulsion and coercion. The characteristic feature of its activities is to compel people through the application or the threat of force to behave otherwise than they would like to behave. But not every [...]

Genius…has side effects

I have borrowed House’s tag line because, as he would say, “it fits” this piece perfectly- But is genius excuse enough for crime? James Oleson, professor of sociology and criminal justice on fellowship to the US Supreme Court, thinks so. “Most geniuses should be punished the same as average offenders, but some geniuses should be [...]