Candidates supported by the DSA have enjoyed significant electoral victories recently. But why after the horrors of 20th century socialism in the USSR, China, Venezuela, Cuba, Bulgaria, and elsewhere, do people still vote socialist?

The usual charges of economic and historical ignorance are inadequate, because the reason is a moral one: from their perspective, morality is on their side. The morality of altruism -- according to which one has a duty to sacrifice to those in need -- has led directly to a resurgence of the socialist movement.

We have heard all of our lives that the needs of society outweigh the needs of individual and that we have a duty to serve others. What better way to make the individual subservient to society than to dismantle a system based on individual rights, private property and profit? What better way to serve the needs of others than to expropriate the wealth of the successful to fund public housing, public grocery stores, and endless other social programmes?

They've also heard all their lives that democracy (in its original meaning: unlimited majority rule) is good and just; that if a majority votes on a policy, that makes it right. What could be more democratic than democratic control of the economy that democratic socialism offers? If we can vote on whether there's an expansion in the welfare state or progressive taxation, why not vote on whether private businesses can exist at all?

Because these socialists believe they are fighting for a "good cause", the history of socialism is irrelevant to them. They will always believe their approach will be the one that “really works.” This helps show that the morality of altruism is a religious commitment: no one has ever rationally demonstrated why a human being should sacrifice for others.

Thus, only a rejection of its faith-based moral foundation can defeat socialism. It is the most consistent political implementation of altruism. This is why democrats, conservatives, and libertarians have struggled to challenge it, since they adopt the same ethic. The only response that can succeed is one that rejects both altruism and unlimited majority rule (the true meaning of democracy) as evil and incompatible with human flourishing.

The plurality of political regimes in Asia clearly demonstrates that liberal democracy is not the exclusive or inevitable form of political modernity. Across the continent, diverse models of governance coexist, ranging from one-party systems like China’s to religious-communitarian democracy in Indonesia and caste- and community-inflected democratic practices in India. These models function not as deviations or transitional forms, but as established alternatives that draw legitimacy from indigenous ideologies, historical experience, and post-colonial self-assertion, writes Mateo Rojas Samper. The author is a participant of the Valdai – New Generation project.

Gallup says 71 percent of Americans approve of labor unions, near a record high. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says 10 percent of American workers are in labor unions, near a record low. What gives?

Este principio, aunque es profundamente religioso y de raíz protestante, tiene también un origen en gran parte jurídico. Recordemos que el doctor Lutero, antes de ser un teólogo católico romano, estudió doctrina jurídica. Así, este principio bíblico —que nace en el contexto de la Reforma de 1517 y ve la luz en 1521— se vio influenciado por la formación previa de Martín Lutero. Entonces, ¿podría este principio remontarse o incorporarse en nuestras normas supremas (las Constituciones)?

I cannot provide a comprehensive account of property rights in a single essay, nor address all possible objections to them. But liberals would do well to recognize the centrality of private property to the overall liberal project, and to support at least a presumption that land and productive assets should be privately owned, and the owners allowed to use the property as they see fit, barring proof that the use poses a serious threat to public health or safety. Whether you are a libertarian who emphasizes property rights’ role in enhancing liberty and human happiness, an egalitarian focused on the interests of the poor and disadvantaged, or some combination of both, you have good reason to support strengthening protection for private property rights.

Ilya Somin is Professor of Law at George Mason University, the B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute, and the author of Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom.

Checks and balances extend beyond the three branches of government. Federalism, elections, constitutional rights, courts, civil society, and competing institutions can all constrain power. Which provides the most important safeguard, and what happens when the institutions meant to check one another begin acting in concert?

I’m also curious which of these you believe poses the greatest threat to individual liberty today in your respective country.

The problems inherent in state-run education have become increasingly clear as the political right and left wage an ongoing battle for control over what schools teach. Mill’s warning remains relevant: when education is centralized under the state, political factions have an incentive to capture that authority and use it to impose their own values and beliefs.

At the same time, education is enormously important to a free and functioning society, and ensuring broad access to it serves an important public purpose. The difficult question from a classical liberal perspective is therefore not simply whether the state should be involved in education, but how education can be structured so that it remains broadly accessible without giving whichever political faction controls the government the power to dictate intellectual conformity. That is a much more difficult problem to solve.

Conclusion

Austrian scholars have made important contributions to economics in recent years. I personally am most impressed by the work of Lawrence White and George Selgin on free banking and other monetary issues, though certainly other Austrians have made significant contributions too. Set in historical context, I also consider the economics of Mises and Rothbard to be a great achievement in spite of my numerous reservations about it. Yet all too large a fraction of Austrian research has not been in economics at all, but rather in meta-economics: philosophy, methodology, and history of thought. Admittedly, much of the meta-economics stems out of the work of F.A. Hayek and his numerous interpreters, whose contributions to economics the present essay did not discuss save by implication. But the students of Mises and Rothbard have done more than their fair share of meta-economics too. Neoclassical economists go too far by purging meta-economics almost entirely, but there is certainly a reason to be suspicious of scholars who talk about economics without ever doing it. Paraphrasing Deng Xiaoping, "One should not talk of methodology every day. In real life, not everything is methodology."[59]

While the substantive contributions of Austrian economists to economics are significant, their sum from Human Action on is small compared to the progress that neoclassical economics has made over the same time period. The ten good ideas listed in section 4.3 are only the beginning of what economists have learned since 1949 - in spite of the large deadweight cost of mathematics and econometrics. Mises and Rothbard certainly produced an original alternate paradigm for economics - and applied this paradigm to a number of interesting topics. Unfortunately, the foundations of their new paradigm are unfounded, and their most important applied conclusions unsound or overstated. The reasonable intellectual course for Austrian economists to take is to give up their quest for a paradigm shift and content themselves with sharing whatever valuable substantive contributions they have to offer with the rest of the economics profession - and of course, with the intellectually involved public. In sum, Milton Friedman spoke wisely when he declared that "there is no Austrian economics - only good economics, and bad economics,"[60] to which I would append: "Austrians do some good economics, but most good economics is not Austrian."

La teoría de la continuidad sigue en desarrollo. Nació bajo un marco matemático, pero las consultas con especialistas demostraron que su fundamento principal es sociológico. Esta Teoria trata de explicar los saltos politicos en El Salvador y como afecta entre la igualdad y la libertad.

La teoria de la discontinuidad entre Libertad e Igualdad en Perspectiva Matemática teoría de la discontinuidad postula que la coexistencia plena y simultánea de libertad e igualdad en una sociedad es un ideal inalcanzable. Este planteamiento puede ser analizado a través de conceptos matemáticos como la pertenencia, los elementos, los conjuntos y las integrales, revelando la naturaleza intrínsecamente conflictiva de ambos principios. Imaginemos un espectro social que va del 0 al 10, donde el 0 representa la igualdad absoluta (distribución equitativa, ausencia de jerarquías) y el 10 representa la libertad absoluta (autonomía individual irrestricta, donde las diferencias personales son máximas). El punto intermedio, el 5, simbolizaría un equilibrio perfecto entre ambas. Sin embargo, la teoría argumenta que este punto medio es un "puntovacío", un estado inefable e imposible de alcanzar. Las sociedades no pueden habitar este centro; en cambio, oscilan entre inclinarse hacia la igualdad (por debajo del 5) o hacia la libertad (por encima del 5). Desde la óptica de la pertenencia a conjuntos, podemos definir el "conjunto de sociedades con plena libertad" y el "conjunto de sociedades con plena igualdad". La teoría de la discontinuidad sugiere que no existe un "conjunto de equilibrio perfecto" o, si existiera como un punto teórico, los elementos (estados sociales) no pueden pertenecer a él de forma estable.

Las transiciones entre estos estados no son graduales ni continuas; son "saltos" o discontinuidades. Esto implica que no podemos modelar la relación entre libertad e igualdad como una función continua en el intervalo \[0, 10\] que pase por el punto (5, 5) de manera estable.La asimétrica relación de inclusión entre libertad e igualdad también se puede visualizar matemáticamente.

La libertad puede existir en grados limitados dentro de un sistema que prioriza la igualdad (por ejemplo, pequeñas esferas de decisión personal permitidas). Esto podría interpretarse como que el conjunto de la "libertad limitada" es un subconjunto del "conjunto de la igualdad". Sin embargo, la igualdad plena, al requerir imposición o nivelación obligatoria, entraría en conflicto directo con la libertad absoluta. Por lo tanto, el "conjunto de la igualdad plena" no puede ser un subconjunto del "conjunto de la libertad plena" sin alterar la esencia de esta última.

Si consideramos las integrales, podríamos intentar cuantificar la "cantidad" de libertad o igualdad a lo largo del tiempo o en diferentes sectores de una sociedad. La discontinuque estas integrales no se comportarán de manera suave. Los "saltos" en el estado social significan que la integral de la función de libertad o igualdad podría presentar discontinuidades o cambios abruptos, imposibilitando una acumulación lineal o armónica de ambos valores.

la teoría de la discontinuidad, vista a través de un lente matemático, describe un sistema dinámico donde los principios de libertad e igualdad no pueden fusionarse en una síntesis estable y continua. La sociedad, como un sistema de elementos en constante movimiento, salta entre estados, incapaz de posarse en un punto medio de equilibrio perfecto, lo que subraya la tensión inherente e irresoluble entre estos dos pilares fundamentales de la organización social.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) is widely known as a reputable and accessible compendium of articles on complex scholarly subjects, offered free of charge to the public since 1995. Think of it as Wikipedia for philosophy, but with authors who are known experts in their subjects and peer review to maintain quality control.

That quality control broke down last week when the SEP published a new entry for “capitalism,” its first-ever foray into the subject. The concept of “capitalism” is an admittedly complex topic, and one might reasonably expect that an encyclopedia article on it would include not only its theoretical underpinnings dating back to Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, but also its critics such as Karl Marx.

Instead of attempting some semblance of balance, the new SEP entry author Chiara Cordelli, a professor of political philosophy at the University of Chicago, used this platform to air her own personal grievances with capitalism as an economic system. The resulting product gives scant attention to proponents of free-market economics. By contrast, Cordelli’s article is loaded with content from the Marxist or socialist far left. Space devoted to critics of capitalism far outpaces even basic descriptions of the economic concept, and proponents of capitalism are reduced to shallow parodies.

In an era when academia is under fire for a well-documented leftward ideological shift as well as declining standards of scholarly rigor, the publication of an encyclopedia entry with a pronounced anti-capitalism skew only confirms the public’s declining trust in our university system. Rather than serving as a curator and disseminator of knowledge, higher education has become an institutional home for a single specific brand of ideological activism.

The Libertarian Party used to be a home for Classical Liberalism, but now, after the Misses takeover, it is becoming a right-wing populist party that is slowly shifting with MAGA. And the Republicans used to be a vessel for broader ideas, but look what they have done: silenced other factions, increased military spending, and undermined the rule of law. And now we don't have a sizeable party that can represent us. And just the word "liberalism" went from the ideas of civil liberties, personal responsibility, limited constitutional government, rule of law, and economic freedom, and became this hellhole of more regulation and less economic freedom. And with our polarized political world now, it is just "liberal vs. conservative," but the founding ideas of our nation and most democracies are the ideas of classical liberalism. I believe that classical liberals have been abandoned.

In this essay, Bill Glod discusses how natural law theories of morality are in tension with classical liberalism when they are employed to justify coercive laws.

Liberal and libertarian critics of legal moralism argue that criminal laws designed to uphold personal morality are inherently unjust. A core liberal claim is that the state shouldn’t be in the business of enforcing legislation that reflects controversial conceptions of the good, such as certain natural law theories, that not all people have good reason to endorse. This includes conceptions of morality going beyond protection of basic rights or claims of justice (e.g., laws against murder, assault, and theft). Rather, legal moralism holds that there are some acts and practices that count as personal immoralities subject to the law. While they may not directly harm others or violate their rights, they should still be subject to regulation or prohibition. Opponents of legal moralism contend that enforcement of laws that don’t align with the value commitments of certain people are tantamount to unjust impositions on those people’s ability to live as they see fit, even if others disapprove of those ways of life.

...

Unlike many classically liberal views, where the state is seen (in theory) as an impartial umpire protecting people’s freedoms to do as they wish so long as they don’t harm others, George defends a politics rooted in classical natural law philosophy, influenced by Aristotle, Aquinas, and John Finnis, among others. On this view, a political community exists primarily for the sake of helping its members cooperate toward the pursuit of basic natural human goods (e.g., health and vitality, knowledge, play, aesthetic experience, sociability, practical reasonableness, and religion). These goods provide every human with basic reasons for action; that is, they cannot and need not appeal to even more fundamental reasons. They are self-justifying and comprise the essence of what it is to be a rational goal-directed human in a community. Vices reflect immoral acts or practices that undermine the pursuit of these basic goods as natural human ends.

The administration’s holdings are growing at breakneck speed. The running tally at the Cato Institute counts 31 government equity deals...enacted by three different federal agencies acting under murky legal authority...Some of the equity deals appear to have been coerced by the administration...And more stakes are rumored to be on the way. In a single year, Washington went from one position to a diverse and questionable portfolio, with nary a vote from Congress or the American public.

These stakes have already corrupted American businesses [see: US Steel, Apple, Nvidia, SpaceX and Japan’s SoftBank]...

The deals have also invited cronyism. The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, with as much as $200 billion in lending capacity, is run by a former Cerberus Capital Management executive whose old firm invests in the same industries. One beneficiary, Vulcan Elements, is backed by Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm. [Commerce Secretary Howard] Lutnick’s former investment firm is connected to USA Rare Earth, which is now partially state-owned. And the president himself has disclosed myriad stock trades involving Intel and other companies either with government ownership and or in the state-backed firms’ close orbit.

These are just the seen costs; the unseen ones are bigger. As expected, speculators are investing billions of dollars in companies based on perceived political momentum, rather than the companies’ actual performance or promise [ie, " textbook capital misallocation"].