This review of Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can End Big Government, by Yaron Brook and Don Watkins, lauds its virtues, while criticizing its tendencies toward a partial and one-sided understanding of the nature of the revolution it extols. In bracketing out a deeper analysis of the role of business in the creation of modern corporatist political economy and the debilitating effects of war and the national security state on markets at home and abroad, the authors ultimately fail (...) to provide the more robust defense of freedom that Rand’s project implies. (shrink)

Research Articles Matt Zwolinski, Social Philosophy and Policy, FirstView Article.

Pincione argues that procedural constitutional guarantees of market freedoms best protect individuals from domination. If he is right, Philip Pettit's claim that various forms of state interference with private markets are needed to forestall domination will prove to be unwarranted. Pincione further contends that market freedoms are best protected by procedural rules for political decision-making, as opposed to constitutional guarantees of private property and other substantive rules.Central to his position are claims that the dispersion of economic power precludes domination, and (...) that free entry into markets furthers such dispersion. As against the idea that the state is in a better position to disperse economic power, Pincione argues that the constitutional provisions needed to implement that idea are contestable, and to that extent require interpretive powers that themselves involve domination. Only a constitution that, as a side effect of its procedures for political decision making, generates full private property rights holds out hope of shielding citizens from domination. This is so, because a plurality of suppliers of goods and services is a structural feature of the free market, in a sense of “structural” that matters for measurements of domination based on fairly uncontroversial claims about persons and resources. (shrink)

A legal system is any institution or set of institutions in a given society that provides dispute resolution in a systematic and reasonably predictable way. it does so through the exercise of three functions: the judicial, the legislative, and the executive. The judicial function, the adjudication of disputes, is the core of any legal system; the other two are ancillary to this. The legislative function is to determine the rules that will govern the process of adjudication (this function may be (...) merged with the judicial function, as when case law arises through precedents, or it may be exercised separately), while the executive function is to secure submission (through a variety of means, which may or may not include violence) to the adjudicative process and compliance with its verdicts. A government or state (for present purposes i shall use these terms interchangeably) is any organisation that claims, and in large part achieves, a forcibly maintained monopoly, within a given geographical territory, of these legal functions, and in particular of the use of force in the executive function. now the market anarchist objection to government is simply a logical extension of the standard libertarian objection to coercive monopolies in general.1 First, from a moral point of view, among people regarded as equals2 it cannot be legitimate for some to claim a certain line of work as their own privileged preserve from which others are to be forcibly excluded; we no longer believe in the divine right of kings, and on no other basis could such inequality of rights be justified. Second, from an economic point of view, because monopolies are insulated from market competition and hold their customers by force, they lack both the information and the incentive to provide consumers with fair, efficient, and inexpensive service. The anarchist accepts these arguments, and merely asks why they should apply with any less force to the provision of legal services. (shrink)

Ayn Rand highly recommended the economic writings of the Austrian school, particularly those of Ludwig von Mises. At least insofar as regards antitrust, money, and government, for the most part, paradoxically, the subjectivist Austrians, and the objectivist Randians, are as two peas in a pod. On the first two of these three, moreover, Rand and Murray Rothbard are on similar sides of the argument, at least vis-a-vis Mises and F. A. Hayek. With regard to the third, there is disagreement amongst (...) the Austrians, and this is matched by ambivalence on the part of Rand herself. (shrink)