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A Review of the Austrian Scholars Conference by Rob
As
some of you know, last week I attended the Austrian Scholars Conference
(ASC) at the Ludwig von Mises Institute
in Auburn, Alabama. A
number of people have asked me how it was, so I thought I’d write up
this review. If
you’ve never seen the Mises Institute, it’s a very impressive place.
Last year they completed work on a large addition to their
building, which is very nice, even elegant. During
the pre-conference session, Professor Thomas DiLorenzo discussed his new
book The
Real Lincoln, and Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe discussed his book Democracy:
The God That Failed. Both
presentations were outstanding. The
best feature of the ASC is that during most of the conference, there are
three or four different sessions going concurrently, so you can pick and
choose which presentations most interest you.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the
presentations that sound the most interesting will be
interesting to you. After
all, it was a conference for scholars about Austrian economics, so a
number of the presentations were arcane or difficult to follow. I
got to hear Walter Block discuss his book Defending
the Undefendable, which was a real treat.
Among other things, Block explained the difference between
blackmail (he’s an expert on the subject, having written some 25
articles about it), in which someone threatens to do something that’s
legal, and extortion, in which someone threatens to do something
that’s illegal. As he
said, unlike gossips, at least blackmailers have the decency to give you
an option before they tell others your secrets.
And every transaction is really a form of blackmail (e.g., “If
you don’t give me that candy bar, I’m not going to give you this 50
cents.”). I
heard a number of other interesting presentations: Rothbard’s
Copperhead Abolitionism by Myles Kantor, Mancur Olson’s Vision
of Government & Economic Growth by Robert Higgs (editor of The
Independent Review), Air Travel: Another Case of Failed Policy
by Paul Cleveland, Chicago and the Cult of Efficiency by Thomas
DiLorenzo, and The Orwellian State System: Big Brother and the
Genesis of Perpetual War by Hunt Tooley. Walter
Block gave another lecture in which he talked about the need for us to
distinguish ourselves from the modal libertarians as well as what he
dubbed the “shmodal” libertarians.
Modal libertarians are socially liberal libertarians who, for
example, advocate not only ending the War on Drugs, but also actually taking
drugs. Shmodal libertarians
are socially conservative libertarians who, for example, oppose abortion
in all circumstances and oppose reparations for slavery.
Block distinguished between evicting a fetus from the womb, which
he argued was consistent with libertarianism, and killing it, which is
not. Over time, he said, we
would be able to save more and more of the evicted fetuses due to
advances in medical technology. He
also explained how reparations are consistent with libertarianism if
certain conditions are met, including payment by the heirs of the slave
owner (not by the government) to the heirs of the slave (not to all
blacks).
Lew Rockwell was awarded the Kurzweg Family Prize, and Stephan Kinsella
won a prize for his work on intellectual property. One
of the best things about a Mises conference is seeing old friends and
making new ones. I got to
talk to my friends Ryan
McMaken (editor of The
Western Mercury), Karen
DeCoster and Steven
Yates, and met William
Anderson, James
Ostrowski, Myles
Kantor, Stephan Kinsella,
Robert Higgs and many others. In
conclusion, I’d recommend any conference that features Walter Block,
Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Thomas DiLorenzo.
I could listen to them all day.
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