Recent Podcast Episodes

From the book For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, as narrated by Jeff Riggenbach.

The motion picture is purely commercial art. Lack of taste can earn a producer a fortune. This is the perfect intersection of commerce and culture. Most movies are bad, but many are very good. The movie form is so recent, that its history is right there to see. It was just a novelty item at first.

Modernism was a reaction to mass culture and totalitarianism government support. Are artists better off being shielded from markets and commercial pressures? There are pluses and minuses to commercial systems.

Art can flourish under any conditions. Many falsely imagine that commercialization is always a bad thing, but the commercial system has produced great art, too. Totalitarianism and modernism is the last thing anyone wants to say anything good about.

There was a conflict between patronage and the market in music, as reflected in the book, Quarter Notes and Banknotes. The classical music tradition is traced back to Paris. The Court of Burgundy in the 14th and 15th Century begins to get interesting.

Dickens’ work reflects popular culture as a feedback mechanism. He saluted middle class virtues. He praised capitalism. He had high regard for free enterprise. Dickens was the greatest novelist in English. Dickens died a very wealthy man.

This is a great example of commercial art and a great commercial artist – Shakespeare. Nobody does like competition, but competition, like Marlowe and Johnson, is healthy for culture. Shakespeare had to approach entrepreneurial backers in London who had surplus wealth to invest in a capital project so that people might spend money on entertainment.

A priceless Klimt painting turned out at auction to have a price - $135 million. Scholarship on painting is sympathetic to markets, unlike scholarship on music. Picasso was even called an entrepreneur.  Picasso was quite wealthy early in his career and died a billionaire. Not every artist starves.

From the book For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, as narrated by Jeff Riggenbach.

Delivered at the Mises Institute on July 6, 2006.

From the book For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, as narrated by Jeff Riggenbach.

From the book For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, as narrated by Jeff Riggenbach.

A legal system is an institution to provide dispute resolution through judicial, legislative and executive functions. The state is that which maintains in large part a monopoly over force, geography and the legal system.

From the book For A New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, as narrated by Jeff Riggenbach.

When can you respond to force? The four response positions range from “never” to “impose by force some further penalty on them”. A person’s capacity must be considered. Compensation instead of punishment is generally a libertarian society’s choice.

Special lecture presented at the Mises Institute on 29 June 2006.

Does libertarianism require widespread acceptance of certain cultural values? One end of the spectrum says yes [thick libertarianism]. The other end says libertarianism does not require any other set of values except the non-aggression principle – the right not to have force initiated against them [thin libertarianism].

We have a right not to be aggressed against. Any other right has to be an application of my right not to have force initiated against me. Now, we need to do this with property rights. We need to treat the violation of property as aggression against self.

Now we go from ethics to liberty. Justice, narrowly, is a legitimately enforceable claim. What is the consideration between justice, rights and utility? Justice seems more rule-oriented than rights. Libertarian rights theory can consider consequences.

Special lecture presented at the Mises Institute, 27 June 2006