The Unbroken Window

Here is an illustration of how the intellectual forebears of the modern egalitarian movement thought: Everybody is poor together. There is much discontent, much regulation of life, but not much terrorism or repression except of the old upper classes. That was Roger Baldwin writing about his gaga-eyed impressions of the young Soviet Union in the [...]

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(A domestic allotment plan for permanent acreage reduction) might work, “if we are really going the route of state socialism. And I am very much inclined to think that we really are going that route.” That was Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace in 1933. There is much more exciting stuff to learn by reading a [...]

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Let’s cast aside the issue of coercion, property rights and even some good economics and focus on a somewhat different major distinction between a free society and the modern constructivist notions of the “good” society. That difference is in what the goals and objectives of such a “society” ought to be. The major distinction between [...]

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Socialism doesn’t work for two reasons (at least). Such a system gets incentives wrong and it cannot aggregate and produce information. Academic debates on these points have been hashed out for nearly a century now. When the Austrians were writing their academic critiques of socialism in the early half of last century (edited: thanks jvb) [...]

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Whether egalitarians wish for a perfectly even “distribution” of income or something closer to even (e.g. Rawlsians), one thing most have in common is that they only favor particular forms of redistribution. In particular, egalitarians are often focused on two very narrow areas: (1) where we will be doing the redistribution, and (2) what we [...]

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Even a cursory peek back to the 20th century among socialist supports would acknowledge that the deaths deliberately caused by totalitarian governments were unconscionably large. Thus, for example, when scientists estimate that totalitarian governments were responsible for the deaths of some 200 million people over the last 100 years (hey, that’s “only” 2 million people [...]

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In the latest episode of Bootleggers and Baptists running wild I noticed an absurd provision at the end of the Food Safety Bill being debated: SEC. 406. FOOD TRANSPORTATION STUDY. The Secretary of Health and Human Services, acting through the Commissioner of Food and Drugs, shall conduct a study of the transportation of food for [...]

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At what point does the production of wealth create a moral obligation to be happy about having some of that wealth plundered by the “enlightened progressives?” For years, classical liberals have crafted sensible arguments for the sanctity of private property on moral, economic and practical grounds. These are ignore, no matter how sound they are. [...]

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He wrote: Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance in that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association of medieval commune [4]: here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there taxable “third estate” of the monarchy [...]

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Tyler Cowen weighs in on a debate “raging” regarding the complaints of a rich guy about his impending (increasing) tax bill: Oddly — or perhaps not – it’s the people who feel they deserve their money who are the most likely to give it away. I’m not going to weigh in. Rather, I’ll ask, is it OK [...]

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