Roderick Long: Fill & Download for Free

I made it through sections 1 and 2 and so far find it quite compelling. The analogy of patriarchy is to women as the state is to the people seems pretty accurate. Usually I critique the state because of its coercion, but aggression by men upon women is widespread throughout society as well. I’m not sure how such oppressive social norms would be abolished.

This is not easy to answer because you are combining a philosophy with an academic field. There are personal libertarians who happen to be economists, but their work is not related to liberty. There are economists who are not personal libertarians, but whose work supports liberty. There are people who lean libertarian, people who are sort of economists and people who are prominent within specific groups or contexts.Another issue is that some of the economists who are best known for promoting libertarian ideas—Thomas Sowell, Tyler Cowen, Walter Williams and Mark Skousen, for examples—are known for their popular writings and do little or no serious economics research. That’s not a knock on them, they are economists and libertarians, but they are not prominent for their economics. Alan Greenspan is similar, although his prominence is primarily from being Fed Chairman. There are no F. A. Hayeks or Milton Friedmans today who win Nobel Prizes in economics and are also best-selling libertarian authors.Finally, there are two subfields of economics: micro and macro. Micro is naturally libertarian, macro is naturally anti-libertarian. That’s not entirely true, but it’s hard to be a successful mainstream economist today if you refuse to accept basic free market principles in micro, and if you apply them in macro there’s not much to talk about. Nearly all economists will sound libertarian if you ask them about the microeconomic effects of rent control or minimum wage laws. But if you ask, “Should the government raise or lower interest rates?” the libertarian answer, “The government has no business meddling with interest rates,” doesn’t contribute to the macroeconomic debate.After all that qualification, I would name John Cochrane, Victoria Curzon-Price, Vernon Smith, Russ Roberts (perhaps best known for ("Fear the Boom and Bust": Keynes vs. Hayek Rap Battle), David Friedman and Deirdre McCloskey as the most prominent, although none are exactly household names. All have top credentials as academic economists, all incorporate libertarian thinking in their work and all have publicized their views successfully outside the profession. Some other good candidates are José Piñera, Michael Munger, Jeffrey Miron, Javier Milei, Roderick Long, Steven Landsburg, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, David Henderson and Constantin Gurdgiev.

Social Libertarianism is not a commonly used term. It may mean:libertarian socialismcultural libertarianismleft libertarianismLibertarian socialism is classical anarchism. The term libertarian, or rather libertaire, was first employed by Joseph Déjacque to mean his strand of anarchism: anarcho-communism. Other libertarian socialists are: Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin and Noam Chomsky.Cultural libertarianism is a strand of libertarianism that is much more concerned with moral individual liberty than with economic individual liberty. Some prominent cultural libertarians would be: Voltaire, Evelyn Beatrice Hall, Mary Wollstonecraft, George Carlin, Slavoj Zizek and Camille Paglia.Left libertarianism is minarchism advocated with a leftist narrative. While right libertarians, the most typical minarchists, admonish the preoccupation with the social justice, left libertarians rather advocate that all social injustices are caused by government intervention, and so that unfettered deregulated markets would resolve all such injustices. Current left libertarian authors are Kevin Carson and Roderick Long.Differently from social libertarianism, social liberalism is well defined as classical liberalism with particular concern for the poor. The truth is that classical liberalism is borne out of concern for the unprivileged, as it raised in opposition to privilege. For instance:"The necessaries of life occasion the great expence of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expence of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be any thing very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expence, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion."Adam Smith, "Wealth of Nations", Book II, Part VII, Art. 71.