Hi, I’m Walter Castillo. I am writing to you to share Paul Villegas’ writings regarding his ‘proposal’ for the ‘axiom of contextual action’ and his ‘defense’ of Hayek. I would like to know your opinion, criticism, or refutation of his publications.
Martin, Milei having the … chutzpah … to attack Hoppe as economically illiterate (while later praising him yet again, like a schizo) reminds me of the time that Cato pest Tom Palmer had the temerity to attack Hans Hoppe for noting that on the free market, “unemployment” is “always voluntary.” When I defended Hoppe to Palmer, he wrote me:
[…] who could take a self-described economist seriously when he writes that unemployment is impossible in a free market? And when he claims that that’s somehow an implication of Austrian economics he adds insult to ignorance. […] The fact is that Mr. Hoppe is an embarrassment.
Javier Milei’s administration has recently announced a plan to inject pesos through Argentina’s central bank, with the declared objective of boosting consumption and thus “stimulating growth. This implies a reduction by 5 points in the banking system reserve requirements.”1[continue reading…]
The first two chapters—my “Preface” and Hans’s “Introduction”—were published the week of Rothbard’s birthday here on the Property and Freedom Podcast (PFP315 and PFP314). The other main chapters will be released sequentially weekly on Mondays. The next in the queue:
Lots of libertarians adore Congressman Thomas Massie. It’s not quite clear why; he never claims to be a libertarian.
“Massie describes himself as a constitutional conservative. He believes in intellectual property and thinks it is necessary for incentivizing innovation. Massie has remarked that this is one of the areas where he is not a libertarian.”https://t.co/SQY94D56ns
Massie describes himself as a constitutional conservative. He believes in intellectual property and thinks it is necessary for incentivizing innovation. Massie has remarked that this is one of the areas where he is not a libertarian.
Bloomberg reported last week that Turkey sold and swapped a total of nearly 60 tons of gold due to the US-Israel war on Iran which is putting a strain on “Turkey’s disinflation strategy, which relies heavily on maintaining a stable or steadily depreciating lira, including with hard-currency interventions, usually via state-run banks. Rising energy import costs and increased dollar demand since the conflict began have made that approach more challenging to maintain.” The Istanbul Post reports that the Lira is now trading 44.44 to the dollar. Back in 2022 one US dollar bought 18.3866 lira. [continue reading…]
When Israel and the US launched their war on Iran, they claimed it would last a few days. A few days later, they said it would last 3 to 4 weeks. As the fourth week ends, it is a good time to take stock of what has happened and the war’s scoreboard, and the political and economic implications. Military matters are unpredictable, and everything can change quickly in battlefields, so this analysis is tentative, but there are clear changes in the facts on the ground so far that indicate the US has suffered a significant setback with important ramifications, and if the US chooses to double down, it may exacerbate it, with momentous political, economic, and military implications for the Middle East, the US, and the world at large.
In a 2003 article on the American Enterprise Institute web site entitled “The Neoconservative Persuasion” the late Irving Kristol boasted of being the “godfather” of neoconservatism. Gaining political clout in the 1980s during the Reagan administration, the neocons have dominated American foreign policy ever since.
In his article Kristol explained that the original neocons like himself were all former communist “Trotskyists” who decided to temper their communistic impulses in light of all the failures of socialism. They remained foreign policy imperialists, statists, Zionists, and enemies of classical liberalism, however, as Kristol also explained in the article. [continue reading…]
The Property and Freedom Journal of the PFS serves as a more formal counterpart to the Property and Freedom Blog features in-depth articles and papers on topics of interest to PFS members and others, such as economics, history, and contemporary political issues, typically from authors writing in the Rothbardian/Misesian Austro-libertarian perspective.
Editor: Stephan Kinsella
Executive Editor: Hans-Hermann Hoppe
We will also add to the journal some previous articles previously published as stand-alone articles at the PFS site.
En el mundo anarcocapitalista y austriaco se habla de Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Murray Rothbard o Ludwig von Mises y está bien, pero el nombre de Thomas DiLorenzo queda sistemáticamente relegado. No es casualidad. pic.twitter.com/6tzkPRiJ4n
In the anarcho-capitalist and Austrian world, people talk about Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Murray Rothbard, or Ludwig von Mises, and that’s fine, but the name of Thomas DiLorenzo is systematically relegated. It’s no coincidence.
My close, personal association with the Mises Institute goes back more than 40 years, to 1985, only three years after the Institute’s founding. In the course of the years I have given dozens upon dozens of lectures. I have been awarded its Schlarbaum Prize and the Rothbard Medal. For a decade, I served as editor of its Journal of Libertarian Studies. I am the MI’s only long standing Distinguished Senior Fellow. Only two years ago, in 2024, I was a featured speaker at the Institute’s Human Action Conference, and my 75th birthday was celebrated at the occasion. In the same year I sent this congratulatory note to Lew Rockwell at the occasion of the festivities organized in honor of his own 80th birthday:
Dear Lew, to your 80th birthday I send you my best wishes and want to say thanks for by now almost 40 years of friendship and intellectual camaraderie.
I know you are too humble to say this, but I can certainly do it: You rank among the most brilliant commentators and analysts of the present age and you are the world’s greatest living promoter of sound economics in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard and, more generally, of liberty, peace, common sense, and reason.
As noted here, the 2026 Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society will be held from Thursday, September 17, 2026 to Tuesday, September 22, 2026.
To donate with BITCOIN please use the address below. If you would like us to credit your payment (for dues, conference fees, etc.) please email Stephan Kinsella ([email protected]) when you make the bitcoin payment.
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“Property does not exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is property.” — FrédéricBastiat
“Because the concept of property, for instance, is so basic that everyone seems to have some immediate understanding of it, most people never think about it carefully and can, as a consequence, produce at best a very vague definition. But starting from imprecisely stated or assumed definitions and building a complex network of thought upon them can lead only to intellectual disaster. For the original imprecisions and loopholes will then pervade and distort everything derived from them. To avoid this, the concept of property must first be clarified.” —Hans-Hermann Hoppe, TSC, ch. 2
The Property and Freedom Society (PFS; Facebook) stands for an uncompromising intellectual radicalism: for justly acquired private property, freedom of contract, freedom of association—which logically implies the right to not associate with, or to discriminate against—anyone in one's personal and business relations—and unconditional free trade. It condemns imperialism and militarism and their fomenters, and champions peace. It rejects positivism, relativism, and egalitarianism in any form, whether of "outcome" or "opportunity," and it has an outspoken distaste for politics and politicians. As such it seeks to avoid any association with the policies and proponents of interventionism, which Ludwig von Mises identified in 1946 as the fatal flaw in the plan of the many earlier and contemporary attempts by intellectuals alarmed by the rising tide of socialism and totalitarianism to found an anti-socialist ideological movement. Mises wrote: "What these frightened intellectuals did not comprehend was that all those measures of government interference with business which they advocated are abortive. ... There is no middle way. Either the consumers are supreme or the government."
(A more complete statement of our Principles can be found here.)
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