CEOs vs. Small Business Owners on Which Policies Make for a Business-Friendly Climate

What do big businesses and small businesses want from government? Pretty much the same thing.

Read Full Post »

In Support of the One Percent

There is an interesting NYT piece by Adam Davidson on Edward Conard, former Bain partner and author of a forthcoming book entitled Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong. Here is one excerpt from a fascinating article: A central problem with the U.S. economy, he [Conard] told me, is finding [...]

Read Full Post »

Saturday Afternoon Bemusement

Tyler Cowen makes the case that a large, inefficient public sector can be a good thing: we should not be trying to squeeze the entire economy into the shoebox of the dynamic but risky “Economy I.” For public choice reasons, as well understood by Karl Polanyi (an underrated public choice theorist if there ever was [...]

Read Full Post »

“Neoclassical Liberalism,” Property Rights, and Capitalism

Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi have a thought-provoking piece entitled, “A Bleeding Heart History of Libertarianism,” in the latest Cato Unbound. They criticize postwar libertarians (specifically mentioning Mises, Rand, and Rothbard) for seeing property rights as absolute and, in their view, regarding the welfare of the working poor as irrelevant to moral justifications for capitalism: [...]

Read Full Post »

Left-Libertarian Economics: Response to Carson

Kevin Carson was good enough to drop by and comment on my posts about his book, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (here and here). I copy the comments below with my responses: (Kevin) Thanks again, Jason. In general, I don’t think any paradigms are falsifiable; you can add epicycles to anything. And I think a [...]

Read Full Post »

Left-Libertarian Economics’ Critique of Capitalism: Part Three

In my last look at left-libertarian economics, I argued that Kevin Carson’s resurrection of the Labor Theory of Value adds no new information to standard, neoclassical price theory. Carson wishes to disapprove morally of profits but does not show that capitalists add nothing to the value of production. In particular, Carson acknowledges that capitalists contribute [...]

Read Full Post »

Left-Libertarian Economics as a Degenerative Paradigm: Part Two

In this post, I continue my series on left-libertarian economics by examining Kevin Carson’s arguments for the labor theory of value (LTV) in Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. I argue that this is one area in which left-libertarian economics does represent a degenerative research program, that is, a body of scientific theories that protects itself [...]

Read Full Post »

Is Left-Libertarian Economics a Degenerative Paradigm? Part One

“Left-libertarianism” can be defined in one of at least three ways. It can refer to “liberaltarianism,” a tactical stance and set of policy positions combining a substantially libertarian thrust with a preference for making alliances with the modern center-left. It can refer to a revisionist philosophical movement that differs from Robert Nozick’s entitlement theory of [...]

Read Full Post »

Weekend Musing

O Capitalism, how I adore you. You are always thinking, day and night, of ways to make my life just a little bit easier. Like pull-tabs on the top of cookie packages so that they stay fresh – what a great idea. But O dear, sweet Capitalism – why doesn’t every wine bottle have one [...]

Read Full Post »

The Million Dollar Internet

How much money would it take for you to give up the internet for the rest of your life? $1 million? Yet how much do you pay for your access to it? The Fund for American Studies just released a provocative short video using those questions as a basis to explore the benefits that wealthy “first [...]

Read Full Post »

“Commodities” vs. “Basic Human Rights”

I’m going to make a generalization here. Treating a good as a “basic human right” is one way to make sure you don’t have enough of it. Treating a good as a “commodity” is the only way to make sure you have plenty of it. I’m thinking about K-12 education, housing for the poor, access [...]

Read Full Post »