Network Archives

The Daily Bell is pleased to present an exclusive interview with Mark Thornton. Thornton is Senior Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He serves as the Book Review Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics and as a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Libertarian Studies. He has served as the editor of the Austrian Economics Newsletter and as a member of the graduate faculties of Auburn University and Columbus State University.

Greece has gone off the rails, and there are lots of post-mortems being written – especially in the mainstream press – about what went wrong and what could go right. The idea, just as we expected, seems to be that the EU will use this crisis as way of implementing tighter political controls over what were until recently fairly sovereign countries. This Time Magazine article makes just that point, actually.

We always have to start these articles off with the requisite nod to the fierce Gods of Ancient (and Modern) Days. So let's get it out of the way. Here goes ... Goldman is a horrible, smug, abusive institution with obvious ties to the power elite. It may indeed be the heart of darkness on Wall Street, the instrument through which the elite maneuvers as it plies its mercantalistic trade.

Hardly anyone will dispute that most folks who chime in about ethics consider selfishness wrong. There have been exceptions in history and some of the most prominent ethical philosophers, such as Socrates and Aristotle, can even be said to have been ethical egoists or at least ones who championed the moral virtue of prudence as a vital one for living a good human life. But after some significant changes in how human nature began to be understood, being selfish or self-interested – or even