Dear Matt Damon, …

(Published also on Mises Canada, here with some additions)

Dear Mr. Damon (I like you: can I call you Matt? You’ll never read this anyway, so I’ll call you by your first name).

So, dear Matt,

Ideas of liberty and intellectual isolation

Pubblicazione in inglese, da parte di Mises Canada, dell’intervento di Giovanni Birindelli alla conferenza Interlibertarians 2016 (Lugano, 20.11.2016): https://www.mises.ca/ideas-of-law-and-intellectual-isolation/

Glenn Greenwald and civil libertarians’ ‘double paradigm’ syndrome

GIOVANNI BIRINDELLI, 30.6.2015 Publication in English: Mises Canada: https://mises.ca/posts/articles/glenn-greenwald-and-civil-libertarians-double-paradigm-syndrome/

Money and the Law (Mises Canada)

Pubblicazione dell’articolo di Giovanni Birindelli in inglese su Mises Canada:

http://mises.ca/posts/articles/money-and-the-law/

Huerta de Soto: how to clear the public debt

GIOVANNI BIRINDELLI, 3.12.2013

(Original publication: Mises Italia, Mises Canada)

A recent editorial by Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera has spurred me to illustrate a proposal to reduce the public debt put forward by Professor Huerta de Soto. Since Alesina and Giavazzi’s article is the same old statist story, discussing it would be a waste of time and space were it not for the fact that it so perfectly represents the non-thought of those statists who consider themselves and inexplicably are considered to be ‘liberals’ because they are in favour of ‘privatization’. Huerta de Soto’s proposal is not immune from criticism, but it offers an opportunity to see what it means to think in economic terms outside the intellectual boundaries imposed by political power (in other words, what it means not to be a megaphone for the regime); what it means to reason about problems in terms of their structural causes rather than their effects; and finally what it means, in this intellectual desert of the so-called “élites”, to have ideas. For these reasons, and because overall I consider it to be a good proposal (though improvable), I think it worthwhile to call attention to it and discuss it.