BLEEDING HEARTS OR ANARCHISTS? There is a movement called ‘Neo-Classical Liberal

BLEEDING HEARTS OR ANARCHISTS?

There is a movement called ‘Neo-Classical Liberalism’, whose members refer to themselves as “bleeding heart libertarians”. This movement combines classical anglo american political institutions and the classical liberal sentiments in favor of freedom and innovation, with libertarian economic and political insights, new institutional economics, and modern macro economics.

I’m torn between trying to coalesce that movement somewhat or simply attempting to repair Austrian Libertarian theory on it’s own by fixing the hole left in praxeology by the failure to incorporate forgone opportunity costs. — It is really a matter of audiences. But audiences matter.

The rothbardian movement is doing such a good job of promoting libertarianism – albiet among relative populists. The Hoppeians are infinitesimally small in number. (Hans might not like it but I consider myself a Hoppeian). But the Neo-Classical Liberal program has a chance of selling to the broad conservative audience.

So my plan is to bring the ‘Propertarian Methodology’ of Rothbard and Hoppe to the Neo-Classical Liberal framework, by adding my work on forgone opportunity costs to the Propertarian body of work. This should solve the problem of explaining the differences between Hayek and Mises, and represent them as a single, unified, spectrum of reasoning differing only in temporal preference.

Propertarian reasoning is the only fully rational explanation of ethics ever developed. Propertarianism unites ethics, economics and politics with econometrics. Combined with the insights provided by the debate over economic calculation and incentives, Propertarianism allows us to fully describe human activity as rational, but limited by knowledge, and fraught with error.

I realize this is geek speak. But maybe there are a handful of geeks out there who are vaguely interested. 🙂

My other goal is to write in short, clear sentences.

I have less confidence in achieving that goal than in solving the greater philosophical problems that I’ve set my mind to.