Liberty Fund

The Originalist Disaster in Chiafalo

If Chiafalo is the best that originalists can do, that is a damning indictment.

An Apple of Gold in a Picture of Silver

Lincoln prudently acted on the moral principle that slavery and its expansion was wrong and violated American principles of self-government.

Adam Smith in Theological Perspective

Jordan Ballor for AdamSmithWorks

John Kay and Mervyn King on Radical Uncertainty

John Kay and Mervyn King talk about their book, Radical Uncertainty, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. This is a wide-ranging discussion based on the book looking at rationality, decision-making under uncertainty, and the economists’ view of the world.

The Works and Days of Thomas More

Thomas More understood as a lawyer and a judge that liberty was justice through the rule of law ordered towards the good of the people.

Two 1930s Political Leaders Agree About Complexity

Two major political leaders in the 1930s agreed that increasing complexity required bigger government than otherwise. Friedrich Hayek, in his 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom, argued that precisely the opposite is true: The more complex a society, the more difficult it is for government to plan an economy.

Probably more than two leaders believed this. But I found a particularly clear statement of the belief in the words of two leaders.

Adam Smith on Religion

Samuel Fleischackerfor AdamSmithWorks

Coasian Spike Solution

A few days ago I engaged in a thought experiment. 

What might Gordon Tullock have suggested to address the problem of the rising number of younger people testing positive for COVID-19.  I used Tullock’s spike, the example he gave of placing a spike in the middle of a steering wheel to “encourage” safe driving, as a way to frame a discussion of how we might think about young people being forced to internalize the cost of irresponsible behavior that is leading to more COVID cases.

I suggested one way of dealing with this issue might be to tax young people who get infected for irresponsible behavior.  Now in the spirit of a less statist, more voluntary solution, let’s think about the problem differently.  The term externalities gets attributed to Ronald Coase, in particular regarding the so-called “Coase Theorem.”  In fact, that is a phrase that George Stigler coined in describing Coase’s work.  Coase himself might have framed the problem COVID problem very differently.

The emerging war on thrift

Within the economics community, thrift was very fashionable during the neoliberal era (roughly 1980-2007). During the 2010s, economists opened a three front war on thrift. Thrift was blamed for rising inequality, stagnating aggregate demand, and debt problems associated with “currency manipulation”. In each case, the charges were false. Let’s consider them one at a time.

The most famous recent critique of inequality was Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty claimed that the forces of capitalism inevitably led to greater wealth inequality unless restrained in some fashion. He focused on the following inequality:

r \ g

Of the Nature and Qualification of Religion, in Reference to Civil Society (Samuel von Pufendorf)

In this work Pufendorf argues for the separation of politics and religion. Written in response to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by the French king, Louis XIV, Pufendorf contests the right of the sovereign to control the religion of his subjects, because state and religion pursue wholly different ends. He concludes that, when rulers transgress their bounds, subjects have a right to defend their religion, even by the force of arms.

The Theory of Moral Sentiments: Part VI, Section II

Of the Character of the Individual, so far as it can affect the Happiness of other People

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.