Liberty Fund

A Badge of Discrimination

The British National Health Service has spoken: Wear the badge or declare yourself to be a bigot.

Transaction Costs are the Costs of Engaging in Economic Calculation

This year marks the 100supth/sup anniversary of the publication of Ludwig von Mises’s seminal article, “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” which marked the first salvo in what later became the socialist calculation debate. Though the contributions of F.A. Hayek to that debate, and to economic science more broadly, have been well recognized, what is somewhat forgotten today is that the fundamental contributions of another economist were also born out of the socialist calculation debate. I am referring to none other than Ronald Coase.

Sweet Land of Tyranny

More democracy is not always the best solution to the problems of democracy, but in the case of a pandemic, it may be our best hope of reasoned action.

Undermining Competitive Federalism

To preserve our federalism the national government must refrain from paying for the past and present fiscal mismanagement by state governments.

A Humble State with No Motocarde

In many ways, the modern world, including economic freedom, was born from the fear of tyranny and the institutions (not always successful) to prevent it. In Power and Prosperity: Outgrowing Communist and Capitalist Dictatorships (Basic Books, 2000), famous economist Mancur Olson had interesting historical remarks about Italian city-states in early modern times:

Sometimes, when leading families or merchants organized a government for their city, they not only provided for some power sharing through voting but took pains to reduce the probability that the government’s chief executive could assume autocratic power. For a time in Genoa, for example, the chief administrator of the government had to be an outsider—and thus someone with no membership in any of the powerful families in the city. Moreover, he was constrained to a fixed term of office, forced to leave the city after the end of his term, and forbidden from marrying into any of the local families. In Venice, after a doge who attempted to make himself autocrat was beheaded for his offense, subsequent doges were followed in official processions by a sword-bearing symbolic executioner as a reminder of the punishment intended for any leader who attempted to assume dictatorial power. As the theory predicts, the same city-states also tended to have more elaborate courts, contracts, and property rights than most of the European kingdoms of the time. As is well known, these city-states also created the most advanced economies in Europe, not to mention the culture of the Renaissance.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments: Part VI, Section III

Of Self-command

Sarah Carr on Charter Schools, Educational Reform, and Hope Against Hope

Journalist and author Sarah Carr talks about her book Hope Against Hope with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Carr looked at three schools in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and chronicled their successes, failures, and the challenges facing educational reform in the poorest parts of America.

Sarah Morgan Smith, ““To Covenant and Combine Ourselves into a Civil Body Politic”: The Mayflower Compact @ 400 Years” (May 2020)

In this edition of Liberty Matters, Sarah Morgan Smith, an Ashbrook Center Fellow, General Editor of Ashbrook’s Core Documents Collections, and co-director of the Center’s Religion in American History and Politics project, helps the Online Library of Liberty to mark the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower Compact by considering its significance —and that of related documents from the same year— in the history of republican self-government and American religious tolerance. Morgan Smith argues that the Mayflower Compact was not just a natural outgrowth of the Separatists’ religious beliefs. Instead it contains the seeds of some of America’s most important political principles.

Local Democracy, Elite Preferences

The authors of Reconstructing Democracy support some level of popular control, but seem unaware of their own refined condescension.

Five (More) Books: Economic, Political and Social Ethnography of Soviet Life

In my previous two posts, I offered recommendations for reading on the Russian Revolution and the Soviet economy. Today, I’d like to turn our attention everyday life in the Soviet Union.

My most cherished comment on one of my books dealing with the Soviet system was from then Department Chair of Economics at Moscow State University, who upon reading my discussion of the contrast between how the system was supposed to work and how it really worked wrote to me to tell me that my description fit perfectly with the daily life that he and his family had to endure.  I had done my job then.  I think the purpose of economic theory is to aid us in our task of making sense of the political economy of everyday life.  Not theorems and graphs on blackboards and textbooks, but the lived reality out the window in the social settings we find ourselves exploring as social scientists and scholars.

Hobbes on Civil Association (Michael Oakeshott)

Hobbes on Civil Association consists of Oakeshott’s four principal essays on Hobbes and on the nature of civil association as civil association pertains to ordered liberty. The essays are “Introduction to Leviathan” (1946); “The Moral Life in the Writings of Thomas Hobbes” (1960); “Dr. Leo Strauss on Hobbes” (1937); and, “Leviathan : A Myth” (1947). The foreword remarks the place of these essays within Oakeshott’s entire corpus.