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Molinari/C4SS/ALL Wild West Tour Dates

By on March 27, 2012 5

Seattle and Las Vegas

Next week I’m off to Las Vegas for the APEE (Harrah’s, 1-3 April), and then to Seattle for the Pacific APA (Westin, 4-7 April). Our sessions are as follows:

APEE, Monday, 2 April:

FMAC Session 1: 1:35-2:50 p.m. [M3.9, Parlor F]:
“Topics in Free-Market Anti-Capitalism”

chair: Sheldon Richman (The Freeman)

presenters:
Gary Chartier (La Sierra U.), “Fairness and Possession”
Darian Worden (Center for a Stateless Society), “State-Capitalist Plutocracy or Free-Market Progress: Which Way Will We Go?”
Roderick T. Long (Auburn U.), “Enforceability of Interest Under a Title-Transfer Theory of Contract”

commentator: Keith Taylor (U. Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
 
 
FMAC session 2: 4:15-5:30 p.m. [M5.11, Laughlin room]:
“Explorations in Libertarian Class Theory”

chair: Roderick T. Long (Auburn U.)

presenters:
Sheldon Richman (The Freeman), “Seeing Like a Ruling Class”
Steven Horwitz (St. Lawrence U.), “Punishing the Poor: The Redistributive Effects of Inflation”
Gary Chartier (La Sierra U.), “Jasay and Libertarian Class Theory”

commentator: David Friedman (Santa Clara U.)

Pacific APA, Saturday, 7 April:

Molinari Society, 7:00-10:00 p.m. (or so) [G9G, location TBA]:
“Explorations in Philosophical Anarchy”

presenters:
David M. Hart (Liberty Fund), “Bastiat’s Distinction Between Legal and Illegal Plunder”
Kurt Gerry (Independent Scholar), “On Political Obligation and the Nature of Law”

commentators:
Daniel Silvermint (U. Arizona)
Charles Johnson (Molinari Institute)
Roderick T. Long (Auburn U.)

Where Minarchists Fear to Tread, Part 2

By on January 9, 2012 1

As previously mentioned, the Society of Political Economy met in 1849 to critique Molinari’s market anarchist ideas. A month later, one of the participants in that discussion, free-banking theorist Charles Coquelin, developed his objections further in a book review of Molinari’s Soirées on the Rue Saint-Lazare for the Journal des Économistes. I have now translated and posted Coquelin’s review also.

These two pieces are especially important as the first critiques ever published (AFAIK) of the idea that the legitimate functions of government could and should be turned over to market mechanisms.

Where Minarchists Fear to Tread

By on January 6, 2012 15

In 1849, the members of the Society of Political Economy – the chief organisation for classical liberalism in France at the time – met to discuss Molinari’s proposal for the competitive provision of security. Gustave de MolinariThe meeting included some of the foremost liberal thinkers of the day, such as Bastiat, Dunoyer, Coquelin, Wolowski, and Horace Say (son of J.-B.). Without exception they agreed that Molinari’s ideas were unworkable, offering much the same objections to market anarchism as those that are prevalent today. (Although, oddly, nobody raised the objection that would later lead Molinari himself to moderate his position, namely the problem of so-called “public goods.”) Even Dunoyer, who in his earlier work had come close to Molinari’s position, now held that it was best to leave coercive force “where civilisation has placed it – in the State.”

As Rothbard notes, this is an odd claim coming from “one of the great founders of the conquest theory of the State.” Dunoyer’s suggestion that democratic elections provide all the competition that’s needed in the market for security also sits oddly with his earlier interest-group analysis of electoral politics.

A summary of this meeting was published in a subsequent issue of the Society’s organ, the Journal des Économistes. I have now translated and posted this summary, which bears the title “Question of the Limits of State Action and Individual Action
 Discussed at the Society of Political Economy.”

Dissolving the State

By on December 23, 2011 0
I'm dissolving in the economic organism!

I'm dissolving in the economic organism!

Newly translated and added to the Molinari Institute online library: an excerpt from chapter 10 of Gustave de Molinari’s 1888 Political Evolution and the Revolution. This extract includes the following passage, whose wording – despite its dismissive reference to “anarchists” – is clearly inspired by Proudhon’s call for the “absorption” and “dissolution” of the state “in the economic organism”:

Thus it is that, instead of absorbing the organism of society according to the revolutionary and communist conception, the municipality and the State are dissolved into this organism. … The future thus belongs neither to the absorption of society by the State, as the communists and collectivists suppose, nor to the suppression of the State, as the anarchists and nihilists dream, but to the diffusion of the State within society.

But if Molinari in 1888 was borrowing without acknowledgment from Proudhon’s 1851 General Idea of the Revolution, Proudhon’s provisions for private police and courts in that work may in turn be borrowing without acknowledgment from Molinari’s 1849 Soirées and “The Production of Security.” Once again, the so-called “capitalist” and “socialist” wings of individualist anarchism prove to be intertwined.

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