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The Battle of Ideas: Economics and the Struggle for a Better World
August 7, 2007
New Zealand Business Roundtable
This paper is Peter J. Boettke's speech at the twelfth Sir Ronald Trotter Lecture in New Zealand. Sir Ronald Trotter was the first chairman of the New Zealand Business Roundtable, who was knighted in 1985 for services to business. The Sir Ronald Trotter Lecture was instituted in 1995 by the New Zealand Business Roundtable to mark Sir Ronald Trotter’s many contributions to public affairs in New Zealand. It is given annually by a distinguished international speaker on a major topic of public policy.
In this speech, Dr. Boettke discusses the role economic ideas play in the struggle to realise a better world. He argues that the hope for the twenty-first century, after the bloodshed of the twentieth and the inauspicious beginning of this century in terrorism and militarism, resides in the liberal ideal of a free and prosperous cosmopolitan order. He calls for an ethic for strangers that transcends national borders, rather than an ethic of geopolitics that rewards allies and aggresses against perceived enemies, and he highlights the civilising role of commerce and trade, a role recognised by the classic thinkers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Hume and Smith.
