Am just looking at the parade for the link you provided...it takes a while to download (love the graphics! maybe we should have a game of chess to resolve this. Do you require a board?)
Holy sh!t, it's nearly 1400 pages long! I've read War and Peace twice, but that was interesting!
I'll get back to you, this will take at least an evening..

Sorry, pawn to king 4 (I'm white since I'm on the side of good)

Not the whole tome, just the first part. It's in plain language.

There are three problems with your last rejoinder.

Firstly, human economic relations don't determine the physical nature of the universe: it’s the other way around.

Secondly, you haven’t even begun to establish the premises on which your argument against capitalism depends. If it’s not sustainable in that the planet is finite, so what? This is no more a charge against capitalism than it is against life in general. If capitalism’s fault is that more people live, then you are a) inconsistent and b) anti-human.

The socialists spent the first century after Marx arguing, as you do, that capitalism grinds the faces of the poor, and now at the same time they argue that it makes the masses unsustainably rich. These two criticisms cancel each other.

You also have not begun to establish that capitalism is exploitative. Marx’s theory was predicated on the labour theory of value, which is easily disproved. If it was right, no business would ever go broke. If you spent $10 million on labour digging up an ounce of gold, the gold would be worth $10 million. A painting by Van Gogh would be worth what it was when he completed his labour on it – nothing.

According to the LTV, the workers are morally entitled to the entire value of the price of the final product. But since they didn’t contribute all that value, they are not morally entitled to it.

Thirdly, no socialist has ever explained how a society based on the common ownership of the means of production would *be possible*. Mises showed that, without private ownership, there would be no market for capital goods and therefore no prices for them. Without prices for capital goods, there could be no economic calculation. There could only be economic chaos and political totalitarianism, which is exactly what happened when socialism was attempted.

As for the development of human potential, please don’t make us laugh with the grotesque idea that this would be better done by centralized coercive bureaucracies according to uniform rules and regulations, than by individual freedom and co-operation subject to a rule against aggression.

Peter, individual and collective themes are both important in society. That is why I support liberal democracy, and why liberalism is still my favorite concept to address both national and international considerations.

However, I have never been convinced of the merit of either extreme left or right wing economic arguments.

I have downloaded your book, and will read the first chapter when i get some spare time.

"I have downloaded your book, and will read the first chapter when i get some spare time."

Oh good. I'm asking specifically whether you can find anything in the first part that you disagree with.

"Peter, individual and collective themes are both important in society."

There is no disputing that. The issue is not between individual and collective themes, it's between voluntary and involuntary themes. What has to be proved or disproved is whether the coercive sector is more or better representative of society's collective interest than the voluntary sector. The ethical and economic argument is, in a nutshell, that voluntary transactions increase human welfare, coerced ones reduce it.

I should not have to say that the methodology of assuming what is in issue should be beneath you. You need to actually join issue, to prove what is in dispute, not just assume it in your favour and deal with any objection by name-calling.

When slavery was common, abolitionists were rightly considered extremists. So what? The true or the good doesn't necessarily lie half-way between existing extremes.