The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security Stateby Aaron KheriatyRegnery Publishing, 2022; xxv + 278 pp.
Aaron Kheriaty is a medical doctor who taught for many years at the University of California Irvine School of Medicine and headed the school’s medical ethics program. Though highly regarded as a teacher, he became a “nonperson” when he challenged the university’s compulsory covid vaccination policy and was fired from his position: “In 2021 I found myself in the teeth of the unfolding biomedical security regime. . . . I sacrificed my career as an academic physician to challenge the constitutionality of vaccine mandates.”
As an expert in medical ethics, Kheriaty soon came to question compulsory vaccination. The vaccine had not been adequately tested,

How do people in a pluralistic society live peacefully with each other? In his review of Kenneth McIntyre’s book, David Gordon points to negative liberty as the best way to preserve values.

Original Article: "Nonmeasure for Nonmeasure"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. 

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Teaching high schoolers economics means teaching Austrian principles.

Original Article: "The Balfour Declaration"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. 

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Nomocratic Pluralism: Plural Values, Negative Liberty, and the Rule of Lawby Kenneth B. McIntyrePalgrave Macmillan, 2021; xii + 214 pp.
Kenneth McIntyre, a political theorist and historian who teaches at Sam Houston State University, addresses one of the most difficult questions in political philosophy in his excellent book. It is a question that should interest everyone who wants a free society. McIntyre sets forward his answer with an immense command of the scholarly literature and makes many acute remarks along the way. In what follows, I’ll comment on a few of the issues he discusses.
McIntyre’s basic argument is this. People have different values, and there is no procedure rationally compelling to everybody by which to show that there is one set of values

Human Rights: Fact or Fancy?by Henry B. VeatchLSU Press, 1985; xii + 258 pp.
Henry Veatch was one of the foremost philosophers of the twentieth century, though sadly neglected by most contemporary analytic philosophers. He was a resolute defender of Aristotelian ethics against rival ethical systems, and in this week’s column, I’d like to look at an argument which he deploys against these rivals in his book Human Rights: Fact or Fancy?
The argument is this. A system of ethics must offer a convincing answer to the question “Why be moral?” Answers to this question must meet two requirements, but the requirements seem difficult to meet at the same time. Only Aristotelian ethics has an intellectually satisfying answer.
For Veatch, then, moral motivation is crucial. He

On John Stuart Millby Philip KitcherColumbia University Press, 2023; 152 pp.
John Stuart Mill wasn’t Murray Rothbard’s favorite philosopher, and Philip Kitcher’s short book would confirm this dislike. Rothbard viewed Mill as a fuzzy thinker, overly prone to compromise and averse to firm principles. These qualities are among those that lead Kitcher to praise Mill, but Rothbardians nevertheless have much to learn from Kitcher, who is a leading analytic philosopher, especially notable for his work on Immanuel Kant and the pragmatists.
His book, the title of which evokes Mill’s famous essay On Liberty, includes a number of interesting arguments, many of them mistaken. But Kitcher also presents in the book a brilliant point about aggregative versions of utilitarianism,

What We Owe the Futureby William MacAskillBasic Books, 2022; 333 pp.
William MacAskill, a philosophy professor at Oxford and a leading light of the effective altruism movement, has recently been in the news owing to the frenzied and fraudulent finance of his protégé Sam Bankman-Fried, who now awaits trial. The “effective altruists” took seriously the implications Peter Singer drew from his famous thought experiment: Suppose you come across a small child who is drowning in a pond. You can easily rescue the child, but if you do so, you will ruin the expensive pair of shoes you are wearing. If you refuse to save the child, wouldn’t this show you are a heartless brute? But, Singer says, nothing in the moral point of the example depends on your close physical proximity

R.G. Collingwood, a philosopher, historian, and archaeologist who taught at Oxford in the first half of the twentieth century, was much esteemed by Ludwig von Mises, especially for his essay “Economics as a Philosophical Science” and, more generally, for his work in the philosophy of history. In this week’s column, I’d like to consider a point that Collingwood makes in his “Fascism and Nazism,” published in Philosophy in 1940, that helps us answer a vital question that confronts us today.
The question is this. The case for a complete free market and a noninterventionist foreign policy is an excellent one. Mises showed conclusively that socialism cannot work, and there is no intermediate system between capitalism and socialism that is sustainable in the long run.

Free Market: The History of an Idea
by Jacob Soll
Basic Books, 2022; viii + 326 pp.
Jacob Soll is a distinguished historian, and Free Market contains much of value, but the book cannot be considered a success, and indeed as it reaches the twentieth century, it becomes a disaster. Even in the parts of the book worth reading, Soll is in the iron grip of a central thesis, one that his historical approach by its nature makes impossible to prove.
In some books, discerning the author’s central argument poses a difficult task, but not in this one: Soll cannot forbear from stating it over and over. The thesis is that, by contrast with free market extremists, who favor a market with little or no government regulation, the state should play a central role, as it in fact

In last week’s column, I criticized Jedediah Purdy for the ignorance of economic theory on display in his Two Cheers for Politics. Fortunately, the book contains much of interest, reflecting the author’s wide knowledge of the history of political philosophy. I have to say, though, that the main argument of the book strikes me as utterly unconvincing.
Purdy starts off well. He asks, Why are people living today bound by past political arrangements to which they have not consented? He says that
St. George Tucker, the prominent founding-era jurist, expressed this idea in his edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries:
That mankind have a right to bind themselves by their own voluntary acts can scarcely be questioned; but how far have they a right to enter into engagements

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Economics
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
Regnery Publishing, 2022; xx + 242 pp.
Like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, Tom DiLorenzo is an economist with an extraordinary knowledge of history, and this shows to great advantage in his brilliant new book. In it, he stresses that economists who fail to grasp how the free market works often devise elaborate theories to show “market failures,” but when examined in the light of historical evidence, these theories fall to the ground.
As a prime example of this, Paul Samuelson in his Economics, for decades the most influential university textbook, indicted the market for its failure to conform to the welfare ideal of “perfect competition.” Concerning this, DiLorenzo says:
That

Progressive Conservatism: How Republicans Will Become America’s Natural Governing Party
by F.H. Buckley
Encounter Books, 2022; 254 pp.
Frank Buckley is always a thoughtful and provocative author, but I disagree with what he has to say in Progressive Conservatism more than with other books of his I’ve reviewed, such as his outstanding American Secession and Curiosity (see my review here).
In the present book, he defends a “national conservatism” and is critical of laissez-faire capitalism, though he does not dismiss it entirely. Whether he is correct that the program he favors is the “winning strategy” for the Republican Party I do not presume to say: he knows far more about such things than I do. Despite his rejection of the complete free market, his concrete

The Lords of Easy Money: How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy
by Christopher Leonard
Simon and Schuster, 2022
viii + 373 pp.
Christopher Leonard’s book brings to mind the familiar line from Faust: “Two souls, alas! dwell in my breast.” Leonard offers a penetrating criticism of the Fed’s vast expansion of the money supply, which has won for him praise from the noted hard-money advocate and friend of the Mises Institute James Grant. Leonard is a well-known journalist and has engaged in extensive research on the Fed, in particular on the papers of Thomas Hoenig, for many years vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, and the extensive notes in the book show how assiduous he has been in his research.
Why, then, do I suggest with my

According to Ayn Rand’s ethics, the only basis for value is an individual’s survival as a rational being. In order to live as a rational being, you must respect the rights of others as rational beings each aiming at his own survival. As Harry Binswanger, a leading follower of Rand, explains,
The basic political principle of the Objectivist ethics is: no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. No man—or group or society or government—has the right to assume the role of a criminal and initiate the use of physical compulsion against any man. Men have the right to use physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. The ethical principle involved is simple and clear cut: it is the difference between murder and

Capitalism vs. Freedom: The Toll Road to Serfdom
by Rob Larson
Zero Books, 2018, 233 pp.
Rob Larson, who is a professor of economics at Tacoma Community College in Washington, does not agree with Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, and Friedman that the free market promotes freedom and prosperity and that socialism is the “road to serfdom.” That is an understatement, and you won’t find any understatements in this book. To the contrary, the book abounds in wild accusations.
For Larson, the eminent economists just mentioned are more than mistaken: they are criminal deceivers. His principal targets are Friedman and Hayek, but Mises and Rothbard are not spared. He says,
This consistent pattern reveals that a number of quite respected Nobel Prize–winning conservative economists,

No Free Lunch: Six Economic Lies You’ve Been Taught and Probably Believe
by Caleb S. Fuller
Freiling Publishing, 2021. 110 pp.
Caleb Fuller, an economist who teaches at Grove City College, thinks that many people have a mistaken conception of economics. It is, they think, a dull and dry subject, the “dismal science,” of primary interest to specialists. Fuller disagrees. He says that “economics changed my life” (p. 11; all page references are to the Amazon Kindle edition), and in this wonderful short book, which can be read in an hour or so, he conveys his infectious enthusiasm for it.
What is the reason for his enthusiasm? Fuller says that he can provide readers with “a pair of eyeglasses that can extend our vision beyond where we’re accustomed to looking” (p.

Nicholas Wapshott is a British journalist and biographer with a strong interest in economic theory. He says that the Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps is his mentor. One theme in twentieth-century economics dominates his work: the clash between economists who favor the free market and those who support a “mixed economy,” in which the government plays a large role. Wapshott’s earlier book Keynes Hayek shows the way he works. He uses the personal relations between Keynes and Hayek to arouse the reader’s interest in the theoretical controversies at issue, and he follows the same approach in Samuelson Friedman. Keynes and Hayek make frequent appearances in this book as well. Here, though, Wapshott has an advantage over his earlier book. Although Keynes and Hayek knew each

The Stupidity of War: American Foreign Policy and the Case for Complacency
by John Mueller
Cambridge University Press, 2021, 332 pp.
The subtitle of John Mueller’s excellent new book suggests that something unusual is in store for the reader. If someone is called complacent, he is hardly being complimented; how then can there be a “case for complacency”? In brief, Mueller thinks that most of the threats and dangers that confront nations are really not that much to worry about, if they are not altogether imaginary. One example will give you a grasp of what he means. Mueller, who teaches political science at Ohio State University and is associated with the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, attracted substantial public attention in his earlier book

Isn’t a principle of nonaggression against others another way of stating the self-ownership principle? “Not necessarily,” says the insightful philosopher Chandran Kukathas.

Original Article: “Is Self-Ownership Necessary?”

Chandran Kukathas is one of the best contemporary political philosophers, and one of the few sympathetic to libertarian views. Unlike Murray Rothbard, he does not consider self-ownership fundamental but instead defends libertarianism from a different standpoint that is skeptical of principles considered apart from their expression in particular societies. In this week’s article, I’d like to look at an extended statement of Kukathas’s position on this issue, his article “Libertarianism without Self-Ownership” (Social Philosophy and Policy,

Raghuram Rajan has written a surprising book. Now teaching finance at the University of Chicago, he is an international bureaucrat in good standing, and not a minor one at that; he was chief economist of the International Monetary Fund. Yet far from calling for an increase in “global governance,” as one might expect from someone with his background, he wants to strengthen the local, “proximate,” community.
“If more powers are delegated from the state to the local community level,” he tells us, “a community can shape its own future better, and will have more control over it. Some communities will have a specific ethnic concentration, and community culture will gravitate toward that ethnic group’s culture…. A strong local community could satisfy people’s need to

In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West
by Wendy Brown
Columbia University Press, 2019
viii + 248 pages
Wendy Brown, a well-known political theorist who teaches at UC Berkeley, does not like Friedrich Hayek very much. She in part blames him and others as well, including Milton Friedman and James Buchanan, for policies that have led to the bad state of the world in general and America in particular today. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism covers other topics, ranging from the case of the Colorado cake maker who refused to create a cake for a same-sex couple to the rise of nihilism about values and Herbert Marcuse’s “repressive desublimation” (not a good thing, I assure you); but I shall concentrate on what she says about Hayek.

Joan Wallach Scott, a historian who is a professor emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has come up with a most valuable insight. She is decidedly not “one of us,” but her insight makes her sound as if she might be. She says,
the notion of the judgment of history rests on a progressive linear view about the necessary superiority, in every domain, of the future as compared to the past, but also—crucially—about the state as the political embodiment of that future. . .As articulated by Hegel, the “autonomy of the state”  was “the ethical whole itself”—the modern state was at once the fulfillment and the embodiment of the telos of history. (p. xvi)
Scott rejects this position, and she examines the way in which this mistaken view affected two

Some economists, such as the 2017 Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler and his colleague Cass Sunstein, have proposed an unusual justification for government interference with people’s choices. They do not intend, they say, to override the preferences that people have. They don’t want to tell people what they “should” want, according to an external standard that people don’t accept.
They claim, however, that accepting the actual preferences people have still leaves room for government intervention. How is this possible? Their answer is that people often choose in an irrational way. They make mistakes in reasoning and choose impulsively. People don’t “really” want what they choose irrationally, so government intervention that pushes people to choose rationally is

According to Anne Applebaum, those who deny American “exceptionalism,” that is to say, global crusading for “democracy,” are dangerous extremists.
Original Article: “The Evil of American Exceptionalism“.

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros.

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I heard several days ago from my friend Larry Beane that people in Walter Block’s seminar who had been reading Theory and History wondered whether Mises is a moral relativist. As I’ll try to show, the answer depends on what you mean by “moral relativist,” but in the way the term is usually understood in contemporary philosophy, he isn’t. I’d like to dedicate this article to the memory of Leo Beane, an outstanding young man of great character and intelligence who was not a moral relativist.
When Mises talks about any question in philosophy, a fundamental rule should be kept in mind. His primary objective is always to defend the free market against any doctrine that can be used to attack it. For example, he criticizes the logical positivists, because their view of

Stephanie Kelton’s new book has attracted much attention, and Bob Murphy and Jeff Deist have already reviewed it, with devastating results. Why another review? The policies proposed in the book are so pernicious that further exposure of what she has in store for us is needed, and I have some new points to offer for your consideration. Besides, there are few things I enjoy more than writing a critical review.
Kelton, who teaches economics at Stony Brook University, writes clearly, though I wish she would not so frequently repeat in her endnotes passages from the text. The essence of the book is straightforward: it’s impossible for the United States, and other monetary sovereigns, to run out of money. “Today, we have a purely fiat currency. That means the

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Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work So Well, and Why They Can Fail So Badly
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xii + 390 pp.
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[Conceived in Liberty: The New Republic, 1784–1791. By Murray N. Rothbard. Edited by Patrick Newman. Mises Institute, 2019. 332 pages.]
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It is well known that Rothbard took the American Revolution to be mainly libertarian in its inspiration. The libertarian impulses of the Revolution were betrayed by a centralizing coup d’état. As Rothbard puts it:
Basically, urban merchants and artisans, as well as many slaveholding

Money, Inflation, and Business Cycles: The Cantillon Effect and the Economy
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