Liberty Fund

Divorcing from China?

If the US got what it wanted economically, China would likely be a more wily and enduring competitor.

Whose Precedent? Which Originalism?

Any effort to restore the American legal tradition must recognize that "individual liberty" decisions have revolutionized our constitutional order.

Lisa Cook on Racism, Patents, and Black Entrepreneurship

How much has racism held back the U.S. economy? What would the country look like today if Black entrepreneurs and inventors had been welcomed and encouraged over the past century and a half? Economist Lisa Cook of Michigan State University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about her research into the impact of racism, lynching, […]

The Theory of Moral Sentiments: Part III, Chapter II

Of the love of Praise, and of that of Praise-worthiness; and of the dread of blame, and of that of Blame-worthiness

A Hole in the Market

“When markets fail, use markets.”

The above is a quote from Arnold Kling, the person who started this blog. I thought of that when reading Sally Satel, “Rethink Crisis Response,” Reason, October 2020. The whole October issue, by the way, is focused on fixing the police, and it’s excellent.

Here are the first 3 paragraphs from Satel’s article.

“Please just send one police car, please don’t have your weapons drawn, please take him to the hospital.” These are the words that many families with a mentally ill loved one have learned to say when crisis strikes. Sabah Muhammad and her siblings have spoken them several times since 2007, the year her brother was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He had been a standout student and star running back at his high school near Atlanta, but everything changed around his 18th birthday. “He would become catatonic, barely moving, just staring into space,” Sabah explains. “Sometimes he locked himself in his room for weeks, refusing food, except to come out of his room at 3 a.m. to make toast that he blackened to carbon ‘to get the poison out.'”

Scottish Christianity Before the 18th Century

Paul Mueller for AdamSmithWorks September 16, 2020

Get in the Zone

Have you ever been on a roll- like a Steph Curry at Madison Square Garden.) roll? If so, you may have experienced the “hot hand.” Or maybe you played roulette at a casino, and you just knew which color would come up next. Are those “rolls” the same? Are they even real?

In this episode, host Russ Roberts welcomes Ben Cohen to talk about his new book titled, of course, The Hot Hand. When someone is “on fire,” what part of our nature does this phenomenon appeal to? Do we see “streaks” more because we are story-telling animals, or are we just “fooled by randomness?”

The problem with court packing

Between March and July 1933, FDR’s policy of devaluing the dollar pushed industrial production up by an incredible 57% in just 4 months. Then FDR’s National Recovery Administration instituted a policy of mandating sharply higher wages. Hourly wage rates rose by roughly 20% in just two months. This immediately ended the robust economic recovery then underway.

When the Supreme Court ruled the NIRA to be unconstitutional in May 1935, there had been no growth in industrial production for 22 months. Immediately after the NIRA was declared unconstitutional, industrial production once again took off like a rocket, until this second recovery was derailed by tight money and another wage shock in 1937.

Ruth Scurr, "J.S. Mill & Life Writing" (August 2020)

Welcome to our August 2020 edition of Liberty Matters. In this essay and discussion forum Ruth Scurr, a fellow and director of Studies in Human, Social and Political Sciences at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge discusses JS Mill and the concept of what she calls “life writing,” According to Scurr life writing is an area of scholarship that involves biography, autobiography and memoir. Her essay focuses on Mill’s Autobiography and the approach that Mill took to crafting what he believed would become the main narrative of his life. Her essay, and the three splendid response essays from our other contributors, raise interesting questions about the outside forces that influence how we view historical figures as well as the caveats we should use while reading “life writing”. As liberalism is increasingly under attack in the modern world, discussing Mill, arguably the 19th century’s most famous English liberal, is particularly relevant.

Two Books of the Elements of Universal Jurisprudence (Samuel von Pufendorf)

This was Pufendorf’s first work, published in 1660. Its appearance effectively inaugurated the modern natural-law movement in the German-speaking world. The work also established Pufendorf as a key figure and laid the foundations for his major works, which were to sweep across Europe and North America. Pufendorf rejected the concept of natural rights as liberties and the suggestion that political government is justified by its protection of such rights, arguing instead for a principled limit to the state’s role in human life.