I’ve been hearing commentators, most notably Sargon of Akkad and Nick Fuentes, saying we need to “give up on the free market.” But we haven’t had anything like a free market for over a hundred years, and what have we gotten for it?
Full show notes here.
Now we have a second mayor threatening people with State-owned grocery stores… how does nobody understand the very obvious consequences of such a policy?!
A short and (attempted) humorous look at this phenomenon.
Now that we’ve seen Locke’s framework and Rousseau’s twisted, totalitarian version of it, I’m going to lay out seven actions taken by governments that Locke would allow, but which spell doom for any government that would actually serve the people.
Full written show notes in PDF format here.
Some thoughts about the recent assault of Emiru at TwitchCon developed into thoughts about calling things what they aren’t, high-trust societies decaying into low-trust societies, and where attacks on property rights eventually lead.
We’ve finally reached the conclusion of this mess of a book, and guess what? It gets even worse right at the end. Book 4, Chapter 8 is about “Civil Religion” and while you might be unsurprised that religion clashes with Rousseau’s concept of a State, it actually gets much worse.
Written show notes here.
Get your free copy here:
https://mises.org/hayek21
This little book contains some of the most important economic and political essays written in the 20th century, and many of these ideas still need more defense in the 21st.
It just keeps getting worse… This week we’re looking at Book 4, Chs. 5-7. In these chapters, Rousseau introduces three new, weird, dangerous institutions to… “help.”
This week, we’re covering one long chapter. Book 4, Chapter 4, is titled “The Roman Comitia,” and it’s Rousseau’s breakdown of the ways that early Roman government worked. I’d even say, coming as it does near the end of the book, that it’s unnecessarily long, because many of the points Rousseau is using this historical analysis to support have already been fervently argued against by Rousseau earlier in the book.
Full show notes here.
I did not expect Book 4 to start with a bunch of weird contradictions, but it did. This week we’re covering the first three chapters of that Book.
Full show notes here.
This week we’re finishing Book 3, taking a look at Chapters 16-18. Rousseau spends a lot of time building up these weird word games that give the same thing multiple names in order to give it a veneer of legitimacy, but he doesn’t retract any of his previous ideas about the unlimited power of the State or the duty of a State’s people to preserve it, both of which lead to major negative incentives which Rousseau conveniently ignores.
Full notes here.