Adam Smith’s Synergistic Moral Authorizations
“Smith teaches how we do our part in serving the good of the whole; how in focusing diligently on the good of our part we serve that of the whole; and how freedom fortifies the remarkable correspondence between those two goods.” ~ Erik Matson
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The Value of High Costs
“As the late Nobel-laureate economist James Buchanan explained in his 1969 book, Cost and Choice, cost is the barrier to choice. Cost is the benefit that a chooser believes he or she sacrifices whenever he or she makes a choice.” ~ Donald J. Boudreaux
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In the Beginning: The Mont Pelerin Society, 1947
“The transcripts of the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society provide an extremely valuable and useful record for understanding the beginnings of the post–World War II movement to reestablish a meaningful market liberalism.” ~ Richard M. Ebeling
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Should the Fed Devalue Our Currency to Implement Negative Interest Rates?
“Where Agarwal and Kimball comment that the zero lower bound ‘is not a law of nature, but a policy choice,’ I suggest that the same is true about the need to fight an excess demand for money by cutting an interest rate instrument or target.” ~ Lawrence H. White
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Suffering from Sunk Costs
“Understanding how to understand and apply sunk costs is important in many ways. And one of those ways is to recognize that when we make a mistake in such efforts, we can’t retroactively fix those mistakes, but we can use them to learn better.” ~ Gary M. Galles
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Nudge Off, Paternalists!
“Americans don’t want bureaucrats, as flawed in the head as anyone else, to try to protect them from themselves. Heal thyself, O regulators! Get back to us when you no longer suffer from debilitating cognitive biases yourselves.” ~ Robert E. Wright
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Nirvana and the Theory of the Firm
“Over and over, people, including many economists, have misunderstood issues such as these when evaluating real world firms through the combination of simplifying assumptions that make real issues disappear and a failure to apply the self-interest test.” ~ Gary M. Galles
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How Hayek Can Transform Our Ingratitude into Gratitude
“Understanding Hayek transforms our thinking into a rich appreciation of how individuals cooperate and bring forth the miracles of the modern economy. With the opening of eyes long closed, our ingratitude becomes gratitude.” ~ Barry Brownstein
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Mises’s Regression Theorem, Bitcoin, and Subjective Value Theory
“If value is subjective, and if a medium of exchange is a good like any other, then how can we say that a good could not first be valued by some person somewhere as a medium of exchange rather than for some other purpose beforehand?” ~ Emile Phaneuf III
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All Value Is Subjective, and That’s a Good Thing
“If anything had intrinsic value, we could only either exchange it for a price precisely matching that value, with neither of us becoming better off, or exchange it for a price different from its ‘true’ value, with one person ending up worse off because of the exchange.” ~ James E. Hanley
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An Open Letter to Phil Magness, by Don Boudreaux
“The future of economic analysis would be brighter if economists today were more knowledgeable about its past – and thought as deeply as did earlier scholars such as Buchanan, Stigler, and Dewey about the nature of competition and the complexities of real-world markets.” ~ Donald J. Boudreaux
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Liberalism Then and Now
“A puzzle remains, namely, what has transformed liberalism from the staunch preserver of liberty, with John Stuart Mill being its most celebrated spokesman, to ‘St. George,’ the righteous zealot, who vows to slay all human sufferings?” ~ Habi Zhang
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