A good answer to Landsburg’s excellent question

David Friedman provides what I think is the best answer to Landsburg's provocative question. I think I have now answered Steve Landsburg's puzzle. The difference between his example (or mine) of an action that imposes only subjective costs and his example of an activity such as reading pornography, or Bork's of using contraception, that imposes …

Taking offence at thought experiments

I love Brad DeLong's academic work. He's way smarter than me and, more importantly, clearly works much much harder than I do. And he tackles interesting questions. But every time I check his blog, I get an awful "Everyone in the world is evil or stupid or both except Brad and a few of his …

Justice and sentencing

My Twitter feed has been filled with Americans and others expressing outrage about a Saudi court's sentencing a man to be paralyzed from the waist down. He had stabbed a man in the back, paralyzing him. I'm not going to defend or oppose the sentence, but I am going to defend a principle here: the …

Now, where was I when we were so rudely interrupted?

Last time I was here, I had a lot of fun teasing American libertarian readers, at least until the earthquake brought my guest blogging to an abrupt halt. Support for liberty is a lot like support for GMO-free food. If you survey people, they'll tell you how much they love it. They might even tell …

Rumble Rumble

Well, my guest blogging stint here has gone somewhat awry. My post on trade relations was sent in Tuesday morning last week, my time. By serendipity, the University's public relations office called a half hour later asking if I could do an interview with Canterbury Television that afternoon on US-NZ trade relations. I said I …

Free trade for the Pacific

A couple of weeks ago, one of the NZ student delegates to the US NZ Future Partners Forum popped in asking about the Trans Pacific Partnership. Since he offered me a decent beer, I was happy to have a chat. In 2005, New Zealand joined with Brunei, Singapore and Chile in a free trade zone …

Moving to freedom

Thanks to President Cleveland for the invitation to guest blog here at Pileus. Grover's invitation came shortly after Marginal Revolution linked to the minor challenge I threw to American libertarians: if libertarians love freedom so much, why do so many libertarians live in such unfree places?  I probably ought to follow-up on that a bit …