The Miracle of the Price System

This week's post at e3ne.org is about the miracle of the price system: Natural disasters harm people’s standard of living by destroying resources, but in a free marketplace, rising prices and profits in scarce goods give both buyers and sellers an incentive to heal the economic wound. Drawn by the possibility of making good profits …

A New Measure of Political Risk: The DOG Factor

Governments behaving badly... We've all seen it. Get a bunch of libertarians from around the world together, and each seems to take perverse pride in proving that her own government is the worst of all. How can we quantify governments' badness? On the economic side, we might look to the Economic Freedom of the World …

Freedom and Prosperity: Some Comparative Historical Reflections on State Policies and Performance

In his 1982 book, The Rise and Decline of Nations, economist Mancur Olson argued that over time, stable societies accumulate "distributive coalitions," narrow special-interest organizations that complexify social life and burden the economy with overregulation and opaque forms of wealth redistribution. The notion that distributive coalitions are more often bad than good for economic performance, …

In which I overstay my welcome

One of the regular Pileus bloggers asked me to elaborate on a claim I made briefly in my earlier discussion of BHL. I had said "there is an intra-libertarian debate [that it is useful to have about philosophical justification: is a system of individual rights ultimately justified because it accrues the best results for the …

Ruger on Zingales on Crony Capitalism

My sometime coauthor William Ruger has a piece in The American Conservative on Luigi Zingales' A Capitalism for the People. He compares Zingales to early Chicago School economist Henry Simons in his willingness to consider unconventional remedies to crony capitalism, lack of competition, and "bigness" more generally: Fast forward to today, and we see another …

*Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School* by Ralph Raico (updated)

Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School is the latest collection of essays from Ralph Raico, published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Ralph was kind enough to send me a print copy. The introductory, eponymous essay concerns the relationship between Austrianism as an economic methodology and classical liberalism as a political program or ideology. Raico …

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.

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 …

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 …

“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: …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

“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 …