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I had many good things to say about Barry Lam’s book Fewer Rules, Better People: The Case for Discretion. However, no book is flawless, and no argument leaves no room for pushback. There are several places where I think the analysis in the book falls short, or at least misses out on important insights. While Lam’s .. MORE
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Political Economy
I’ve noticed with increasing frequency that various commentators on the media talk about who runs the country. Many right wingers think that Joe Biden was supposed to run the country but didn’t and, instead, he deferred to a troika who ran the country. Many people across the spectrum think that Donald Trump currently runs .. MORE
Incentives
Since Trump declared a global trade war on April 2, American firms have been scrambling to manage tariffs (as an aside, this puts a lie to the oft-repeated claim that only foreigners pay tariffs). I’ve written before on some of the hidden costs of tariffs. Another hidden cost appears in the form of Foreign Trade .. MORE
Unintended Consequences
On March 15th, 2024, the Chicago-based National Association of Realtors (NAR) came forward with a stunning announcement: in response to two 2019 class-action lawsuits, it finally agreed to a settlement sum of $626 million and promised dramatic changes in the real estate business. The lawsuit charged that the NAR had excessive market power that allowed .. MORE
Income and Wealth distribution
I like looking at the extremes. If it were actually true that capitalism causes selfishness, then what are the odds that the world’s most free market country would also be the world’s most egalitarian country? But it is. If it were actually true that fertility rates are falling because it’s too costly to raise kids .. MORE
Game Theory
It is certain that President Trump’s reply to the TACO (“Trump Always Chickens Out”) accusation will not win him a Nobel prize in economics. The Wall Street Journal reports (“The ‘TACO Trade’ That Has Trump Fuming,” May 28, 2025): The president rejected claims that he is backing down on tariffs, saying his strategy involves setting .. MORE
Uncategorized
Overall, I enjoyed Barry Lam’s book Fewer Rules, Better People: The Case for Discretion. I was initially motivated to read the book because I had been thinking about two different ideas common to classical liberal and libertarians that seemed to be in tension with each other. The first is the idea of dispersed nature of knowledge. .. MORE
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Why California Gas Prices Are the Highest in America By Vance Ginn, The Daily Economy, May 23, 2025. Excerpt: According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), gasoline prices are generally shaped by five components: crude oil prices, refining costs, distribution and marketing, taxes, and regulations. In California, taxes and regulatory costs alone account for .. MORE
Adam Smith
Without trade, life more complex than bacteria could not exist. We are literally made of free trade. It is in every cell of our bodies. The first lifeforms to evolve on Earth, at least 3.5 billion years ago, were very simple. They were single-celled organisms that lacked a nucleus or the organelles we see in .. MORE
Books: Reviews and Suggested Readings
On his Substack, Bet On It, Bryan Caplan today posted a segment from his newest book, Unbeatable. The segment is short and so I recommend reading the whole thing. One key paragraph: Mainstream economics and free-market economics: Since I’ve long lived in both of these intellectual worlds, I know their inhabitants well. I don’t just .. MORE
Can the four-year degree be saved? Not for most learners, I would argue. Once less expensive alternative pathways become clearer and surer, a full-on degree will seem impractical… But why does the degree have to be the only product that colleges sell? And why can’t the American Dream be achieved by other college products, other .. MORE
Friedrich Hayek’s 1945 article in the American Economic Review, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” has become a classic. It was the last in a series of articles in which Hayek put the final intellectual nail in the coffin of socialism. Hayek argued persuasively that the information that is most valuable in an economy is .. MORE
[ Note: This article was originally published on March 10, 2025 by Scott Sumner at his substack under the title “False Dawn: George Selgin on the New Deal.”] A Book Review of False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery: 1933-1947, by George Selgin.1 Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal policies had three goals: .. MORE
A Liberty Classic Book Review of Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour by Helmut Schoeck.1 I’ve been such a fool, Vassili. Man will always be man. There is no new man. We tried so hard to create a society that is equal, where there’d be nothing to envy your neighbor. But there’s always something to .. MORE
I cannot think of any reason even a uniform tariff, that nevertheless creates a distortion between tradable (positive for import substitutes and negative for exports) and non-tradable goods woud be preferable to a sales tax/VAT. ..
Thomas L Hutcheson, May 31