The Unbroken Window

Both radical libertarians (e.g. Charles Murray) and radical progressives (e.g. Bill McKibben) see local communities as the salvation of the world. Can both be right?

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I’ve not blogged much on democracy, elections and campaign finance issues. One reason is that I cannot stomach the hypocrisy on both sides of the aisle on this one.  Here is a very nice illustration of the hypocrisy on the right by Marc Elias. And in today’s Wall Street Journal is an unsurprising thought question [...]

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The Rochester woman who filmed the police stop outside her house was acquitted of the criminal charges brought against her. But I thought you’d appreciate these two pieces: (1) The Pink Rulers of Law: In response to the above incident, the Rochester thugs police “converged on Clarissa Street late Thursday afternoon and began ticketing their [...]

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Remember that to be part of my series, the proposal must not be one that can easily be demagogued by either the left or right and that it is not offered directly in the spirit of increasing or decreasing government, among other requirements. If I were King for a Day I would like to institute [...]

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Just to illustrate the absurdity of our modern police state. I was stopped while driving through a toll booth a few weeks ago and the officer claimed I had violated the hands-free cell-phone law. Now I am pretty aware of the legislation that says you cannot speak on your cell phone in my car. Do [...]

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Maybe it is well known that the major discrimination faced by blacks in the South originated from government laws like Jim Crow laws that institutionalized something that good economics seemed to have been eroding. But how well known is the fact that early efforts by governments to provide (modest) welfare benefits to the poor were [...]

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Earlier this month, we nominated EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson for the First Economic Darwin Award. What follows is her very lengthy award citation. In red you see the excerpts from the entirety of the OpEd she wrote in the December 2nd edition of the Wall Street Journal. Everything else is my commentary. Despite the length [...]

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In the Constitution of Liberty Hayek claims that society would be well served if we randomly selected 1 in 1000 people and endowed them with enough wealth so they could independently pursue any project of their choosing! The random part is important – if we had to decide as a “society” to reward a particular [...]

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The only memory I have of my $100,000+ education is a small seminar I took with the then President of the College, Peter Pouncey. I was totally lost and clueless about much of anything we read and discussed. But I knew it was important stuff. Indeed, my most vivid memory was a class where we [...]

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There is a reason they say that, “the devil is in the details.” A much neglected work of Hayek is his 1939 manuscript, “Freedom and the Economic System.” In it he points out something that would probably open up a lot of my students eyes, especially those who ask things like, “if X is so [...]

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