Voting: The Seen and the Unseen

The example you set for your children and friends by voting to place a warmonger, a redistributionist, or any other rights violator (or anybody, really) into an inherently destructive office at the head of an inherently destructive hyper-state has impacts that will propagate throughout society and posterity like ripples in a pond, and will be far more significant than any direct impact it has on the election at hand.

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The Brilliance and Bravery of Mises

"Throughout his career Mises was ever the picture of principled intransigence. An intellectual Leonidas, surrounded by hordes of socialists, fascists, money cranks, and neoliberals, he stood his ground. Even as old allies — like those swept up in the Keynesian Revolution — fell away, still he stood his ground. Still he fought. And he fought not only for the sake of future generations, but for the sake of his own.

For Mises, it was not enough to theoretically expose the folly of inflationism in The Theory of Money and Credit, a book for the ages. He also personally fought the inflationism present in interwar Austria, using his influence to save his homeland from the hyperinflation that would soon after befall Weimar Germany and contribute toward the rise of Nazism.
For Mises, it was not enough to theoretically prove the madness of socialism in Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, another book for the ages. He also personally dissuaded the most powerful man in Vienna from imposing on that city the Bolshevism that would soon after lead to famine in Russia.
Mises's efforts probably saved the lives of thousands — and the livelihoods of millions."

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The 99 and the 1

Whatever one thinks of the current plight of the 99%, throughout almost all of history, things were much worse for the vast majority of the population. In precapitalist ages, the average member of the economic 99%, if lucky enough to survive infancy, was consigned to a life of back-breaking work and poverty, constantly on the verge of famine, disease, and death.

The only individuals who did not have such a wretched life were the "1%" of old. This economic 1% was virtually identical with the state. It was made up of the French kings, the English lords, the Roman senators, the Egyptian viziers, and the Sumerian temple priests. The members of this elite lived in Olympian splendor: servants at their beck and call, as much food as they could possibly want, spacious homes, an abundance of jewelry, and a tremendous amount of leisure time.

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The Mystery of the Marginal Pairs

The great Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk considered the supply-and-demand formulation as all well and good, but he discovered that prices are determined more directly by something else.

In any given market for a good, there will always be four people whose valuations put them in a special position. Böhm-Bawerk called these four people the "marginal pairs." It is these marginal pairs that directly determine prices.

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Two's Company: The Basics of Property

Hume went on to suppose that in this situation every person's natural beauty is such that he has no desire for adornment, that the weather is so mild that he has no need for clothing, that all around him wild plants bear in abundance the most delectable food and natural springs spill out in profusion the most delicious beverages.

Hume argued that in such a paradise, the human conventions of property and justice would be entirely useless.

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In Defense of Mises's Utilitarianism

The sound utilitarian does not say the purpose of a moral code should be social utility. But rather the purpose of moral codes are and always have been ultimately social utility. In this way, utilitarianism, strictly speaking, is more about "meta-ethics" than "ethics."

If thought leaders realize that, for example, a liberal moral code (both as a whole, and in its constituent parts) is more socially expedient than alternative codes, and they convince the general populace of that fact, this revolution in public opinion would engender a revolution in the prevailing moralit

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The Utilitarian Foundation of Morality

The libertarian who uses both approaches will argue from two different sets of grounds to arrive at the same conclusion. Many libertarians simply welcome the thought that their rhetorical armory has two expansive wings, and pay little regard to if and how the two wings are connected. But when two different approaches to a question happen to arrive at the same answer, the hand tends to drift toward Ockham's razor. The suspicion arises that one approach can ultimately be resolved into the other.

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Why Liberalism?

The liberal order of society involves private property, first-user appropriation (homesteading), contracting, producing, and the continuous legal ownership of that which one has homesteaded, contracted for, or produced, even if the owner is not the one physically manipulating it.

This kind of order, even in early, primitive stages, results in capital accumulation and material enrichment. If maintained and adhered to strictly enough, the liberal order ultimately results incapitalism: a social system of production characterized by economic calculation, effective coordination among billions of strangers, mass production for the masses, and seemingly miraculous strides in the improvement of human welfare.

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