The Unbroken Window

Tom Palmer points us to two statements in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights: Article 24: Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay. Article 25: Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself [...]

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The most common defense of government use of “eminent domain” proceedings is that without the power to take land (nominally with just compensation) we would all suffer from the “holdout problem.” The holdout problem is simply this – if we are undertaking a large investment project, such as the building of a new college campus, [...]

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Without a long exegesis on the merits of child labor laws, allow me to raise the following observations without comment (for example, we could spend weeks discussing what it means to be a child). My sense is that most people would view child labor laws as useful, and that the employment of children is a [...]

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The use of torts is an imperfect, albeit valuable tool for environmental protection (I’ll put up lecture notes in the coming months). Think about the implications for the environment of a world where there are limits to private property, or where private property is eliminated. How would aggrieved parties deal with pollution? If you do [...]

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In case any one had delusions about what government is about: “it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.” That’s Rep. Dingbat Dingell from Michigan, the renowned economic powerhouse state. Here is the audio.  But I only want [...]

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One of my bright students asked me a question that roughly goes like this: “What is the true definition of compulsory?” What could he possibly mean by that? Isn’t it obvious? Perhaps not. Consider two strategies a government can use to deal with a situation where lots of customers want to use a resource, but [...]

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The states are also eroding the tradition of respect for private property, just like their Uncle Sam has been doing for centuries. This Mitchell Ditch case in Montana just came to my attention: The Montana Supreme Court ruled here recently that the 16-mile-long stream, Mitchell Slough, is open to the public and that the landowners [...]

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So you think the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act guarantee that the air and water are cleaned? One goal of the Clean Water Act of 1972 was to upgrade the nation’s sewer systems, many of them built more than a century ago, to handle growing populations and increasing runoff of rainwater and waste. [...]

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To Those Who Condemn Liberty, I’d remind you that the American founding, whatever its ugly warts and inconsistencies, was essentially a libertarian founding. It could never be more truly said than of the first remedy, that it was worse than the disease. Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which [...]

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I am rereading Hernando DeSoto’s Mystery of Capital to prepare for a few lectures on property rights I do in my Environmental class. Here is one of my favorite thoughts: The lack of legal property thus explains why citizens in developing and former communist nations cannot make profitable contracts with strangers, cannot get credit, insurance, [...]

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