Category Archives: Libertarianism

EB56 Daniel Krawisz: Nakamoto Institute, Bitcoin Libertarianism, The Problem with Appcoins
We are joined by Daniel Krawisz, the Director of Research at the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute. Daniel co-founded that organization last year with Michael Goldstein and Pierre Rochard to educate...

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EB56 Daniel Krawisz: Nakamoto Institute, Bitcoin & Libertarianism, The Problem with Appcoins - Video

Milton Friedman - Libertarianism and Humility
On August 14, 1990, at the International Society for Individual Liberty #39;s 5th World Libertarian Conference, Milton Friedman took a step back from the details...

By: BensMovieStudio

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Milton Friedman - Libertarianism and Humility - Video

Conversation with John Tomasi - Free Market Fairness and Libertarianism (Skyperadio Ep. 9)
Prof. John Tomasi (Brown University), the author of "Free Market Fairness", in conversation with Otto Lehto. Is social justice compatible with free market id...

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Conversation with John Tomasi - Free Market Fairness and Libertarianism (Skyperadio Ep. 9) - Video

Ep. 10: What Is Libertarianism? (with David Boaz)
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By: USA people

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Ep. 10: What Is Libertarianism? (with David Boaz) - Video

This interview with Mises Institute President Jeff Deist is reprinted from the October 2014 issue of the Lara-Murphy Report.

Lara-Murphy Report: How did you become interested in Austrian economics?

Jeff Deist: I definitely discovered libertarianism first, which then led me to Austrian economics. I was a hardcore libertarian fairly early in life, going to see Ron Paul at a 1988 Libertarian Party campaign event when I was in college. A few years later my close friend Joe Becker enrolled at UNLV for the express purpose of studying under Professor Murray Rothbard in the graduate economics department, and I was able to sit in on a few of Murrays classes. I knew nothing about the Austrian School at the time, but it became clear I needed a more comprehensive intellectual foundation antipathy for the state and a belief that free markets worked better was not enough. Reading Rothbard was my start. This is how most young people today first hear about Mises, Rothbard, or Hayek they already have an interest in libertarian political theory.

They hear references to these great names from their friends, from libertarian think tanks or organizations, from a huge variety of libertarian websites, and from social media, and they begin the process of educating themselves.

The Ron Paul 2012 campaign was a great example of this: people instinctively knew they favored property rights, markets, and peace. They knew they opposed cronyism and the banking cartel. But when Ron mentioned Murray or Mises or Austrian economics or the Fed in a speech, people wanted to go out and find the original sources for themselves. Of course those of us from Generation X remember when vast amounts of free Austrian literature were not just a click away, to put it mildly. If you were lucky your local mall bookstore might have Milton Friedmans Free to Choose and maybe Hayeks Road to Serfdom right next to John Kenneth Galbraiths The Affluent Society. Mises and Rothbard certainly werent available at local libraries or university libraries. All that has changed today.

But obviously the Austrian School predates the modern libertarian movement. Thats why for much of the twentieth century many people read Austrian economics before arriving at philosophical or political libertarianism. The direction was reversed. Smart individuals were absorbing giants like Leonard Read, Henry Hazlitt, and Mises, but they saw themselves as liberals in the classical European tradition of the word. Murray Rothbard deserves much of the credit for building a modern libertarian framework using Austrian economics as the foundation, and creating a bridge for true liberals after the term was hijacked.

LMR: You worked for Ron Paul in his congressional office for several years. I suppose unlike most people in that type of a job, you didnt have to lie every day at work! Is there any story you can share to illustrate the culture of DC and how you were the oddballs?

JD: My favorite anecdote involves other members of Congress asking us to have Ron sign books, photos, etc., for their constituents. This no doubt galled them, because Ron was a celebrity of sorts while they were unknown. But trust me, the average member of Congress deserves to be forgotten. They are a venal, mean, petty, and self-important bunch, despite the fact that maybe 1 in 20 of their constituents knows their names.

Working for Dr. Paul was a great experience. We (as a staff) never had to worry about Ron being tempted to sell out or cast a safe vote due to political pressure. Rons office was far and away the most intellectual and philosophical office on Capitol Hill; the other members of Congress were purely political animals focused either on consolidation of power or self-preservation, depending.

By contrast, we were busy quoting Mises, Rothbard, Bastiat, Tom Woods, Lew Rockwell, Lysander Spooner, you name it, in Rons speeches, statements, press releases, and weekly columns. Virtually everyone on staff was at least familiar with Austrian thought, and we used mises.org as a frequent resource.

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Antipathy for the State Is Not Enough

A national organization advocating marijuana policy reform will recognize Howard County Executive Allan Kittleman's support of decriminalization in Maryland in an awards ceremony Friday.

The award is a gesture of thanks from the Marijuana Policy Project, the largest organization of its kind according to its website, to several of the state's Republican lawmakers who supported decriminalization in Annapolis last session.

The presentation will take place as part of the Maryland GOP Fall Convention Eve Party, held at Turf Valley Hotel and Conference Center in Ellicott City.

Kittleman, who has built his political success on a philosophy of fiscal conservatism and social libertarianism, was a co-sponsor, along with Democratic Sen. Bobby Zirkin, of a bill to decriminalize marijuana that successfully passed the General Assembly earlier this year.

Former Del. Don Murphy, a Republican who represented District 12 which incorporates parts of Howard and Baltimore counties for a decade, will be presenting Kittleman's award. Other GOP members who supported the bill will also be honored.

""We are pleased to present this award to Executive Kittleman and the other Republican lawmakers who helped bring about these much-needed reforms," Murphy said in a statement. "Ending our failed marijuana prohibition policies makes sense regardless of what side of the political spectrum you're on. It is refreshing to see that the GOP in Maryland and across the country is beginning to show leadership on this important issue."

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Kittleman to receive award for decriminalization support

Yves here. Naked Capitalism contributor Andrew Dittmer, perhaps best known for his series on libertarianism (see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and his responses to reader comments) has returned from his overlong hiatus to interview the authors of the highly respected new book, Private Equity at Work.

Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt have produced a comprehensive, meticulously researched, scrupulously fairminded, and therefore even more devastating assessment of how the private equity industry operates, including its deal and tax structuring methods, its impact on employment, and whether its returns are all they are purported to be. Their work was reviewed in the New York Review of Books; we also discussed it in this post.

Earlier this year, Andrew spoke with Appelbaum and Batt, and the first part of their discussion covers the problematic relationship between private equity funds (general partners) and their investors (limited partners) and how private equity affects other businesses.

In some cases, Appelbaum and Batt bending over backwards to be evenhanded. For instance, they attribute the explosion in CEO pay not to the leveraged buyouts industry (private equity before it was rebranded in the 1990s) but to an article by Michael Jensen in the Harvard Business Review that argued for paying CEOs like entrepreneurs. While narrowly true that the Jensen article was the proximate cause of the shift in big corporate pay models, having lived through the 1980s and the way that LBOs captured the attention of the business press, it is hard to imagine Jensens thesis being taken seriously in the absence of the LBO boom. The maximize shareholder value theory of corporate governance was first presented in a Milton Friedman New York Times op-ed in 1970 and had not gotten traction with the mainstream. It was the wave of takeovers of overly-diversified conglomerates in the 1980s and the easy profits garnered by breaking them up and selling off the pieces that seemed to prove the idea that too many CEOs didnt have the right incentives to run their businesses well (and in fact, its also true that the business press of the 1970s decried American management as hidebound and much less good at working with labor than the Japanese or Germans). But as weve seen since then, equity-linked pay has produced rampant short-termism and facilitated looting by executives. Even if the old pay model was problematic, its replacement has performed even worse, save for the CEOs themselves.

By Andrew Dittmer, who recently finished his PhD in mathematics at Harvard and is currently continuing work on his thesis topic as well as teaching undergraduates. He also taught mathematics at a local elementary school. Andrew enjoys explaining the recent history of the financial sector to a popular audience

Interactions of General Partners (GPs) with Limited Partners (LPs)

Eileen Appelbaum: Rose and I did a briefing at the AFL for the investment group. We had investment people from both union confederations who are concerned about the fact pension funds are putting so much money into private equity. They told us that they had never been able to see a limited partner agreement until Yves Smith published them. The pension fund people are so afraid of losing the opportunity to invest in PE. Some general partner could cut them off for having shared the limited partner agreement. Unbelievable.

Andrew Dittmer: In general, LPs seem to have a pretty submissive attitude toward GPs. Where do you think this attitude comes from?

Rosemary Batt: One cause is the difference in information and power. Many pension funds dont have the resources to hire managers who are sophisticated in their knowledge of private equity firms. They dont have the resources to do due diligence to the extent they would like to, so they need to rely on the PE fund, essentially deferring to them in what they say.

Eileen Appelbaum: I think that there is a reluctance to question this information or to share it with other knowledgeable people they are afraid that if they do, they will not be allowed to invest in the fund because the general partners will turn them away.

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Andrew Dittmer: Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt on How Private Equity Really Works

Theresa May is pushing a terrorism bill through parliament which will place a legal duty on universities to ban radical speakers. Photograph: Handout/Reuters

In the 1860s when the Austrian ambassador complained to the home secretary, Sir George Grey, about Karl Marx and other revolutionaries, he received a brief and dismissive reply: Under our laws, mere discussion of regicide, so long as it does not concern the Queen of England and so long as there is no definite plan, does not constitute sufficient grounds for the arrest of the conspirators.

Not quite what the current home secretary would have replied, I suspect. Theresa May is rushing yet another terrorism bill through parliament. This will place a legal duty on universities to ban radical speakers mere discussion in the words of her Liberal predecessor, who probably also took a more favourable view of being labelled radical.

Fifty years ago Malcolm X came to speak in Oxford, an episode now recalled to stir the sentimental memories of the universitys alumni. Today, of course, he would never have made it to Oxford; the UK Border Agency would have turned him back at Heathrow. After all even the very silly, but vile, Julien Blanc, the seducers guru, has been banned.

Malcolm X would probably have fared better in his homeland. The United States remains a nation of laws girded by a constitution, despite police shootings and protest riots. Sadly the United Kingdom is rapidly becoming a nation of ministerial discretion and direction, ever wider administrative powers that would probably have more than satisfied the 19th-century Prussian and Austrian bureaucrats who were so worried about Marx.

Under Mays new legislation, universities will have to follow the guidance issued by the Home Office. If they fail to follow it, the home secretary will be able to issue them with directions. Far from being regarded as institutions in which the most vigorous (and contested) debates should be encouraged, higher education institutions are now to be treated as fertile ground for the radicalisation of gullible students by supporters of extremism.

This is not the first time the government has introduced legislation to require universities to ban extremist speakers, although paradoxically the first political intervention back in the 1980s was to stop universities, and student unions, banning rightwing speakers, extremists of another ilk.

But this initial, and rather one-sided, libertarianism was quickly succeeded by more authoritarian interventions. Until now, the centrepiece has been the Prevent strategy, begun under Labour and revamped by the current government.

The 2011 white paper asserted the governments absolute commitment to defending freedom of speech. But, in the very next sentence, it argued that preventing terrorism meant that extremist (but non-violent) views had to be challenged by the administrative measures it then outlined. We have travelled a long road from Greys reply to the ambassador.

There is so much wrong with the new legislation. The key terms such as radicalisation, extremism and terrorism will be defined by politicians who are advised by securitocrats, cowed by tabloid-inflamed public opinion and influenced by electoral advantage.

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Anti-terror measures will make us the extremists we fear

Defining Libertarianism

By: kerry pratt

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Defining Libertarianism - Video

FFF Needs Your Help: How I Discovered Libertarianism (video #2)
Please consider supporting the work of The Future of Freedom Foundation. You can donate here https://app.etapestry.com/onlineforms/TheFutureofFreedom/support.html.

By: The Future of Freedom Foundation

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FFF Needs Your Help: How I Discovered Libertarianism (video #2) - Video