Smart Society, Stupid People
“If economies come to be restored, eventually, to their former selves, it will not be because we or our leaders somehow beat a virus. The virus outsmarted everyone. What will fix what the political class has broken is the freedom once again to piece back together the institutions and processes that create the extended order that makes us all feel smarter than we really are.” ~ Jeffrey Tucker
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The Desperate Loneliness of Social Media
“Other-directed voters go on social media to try to figure out which politicians and policy proposals will earn them the most plaudits from assorted avatars and social influencers. They value fitting in over logic or consistency and many seem genuinely puzzled when the inconsistencies in their expressed opinions are pointed out to them.” ~ Robert Wright
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Free Down Payments and Subsidized Mortgages are Not Social Justice
“Despite 50 years of debacles, politicians are still glorified for pretending that free downpayments and subsidized mortgages are “magic beans” that multiply social justice in America.” ~ James Bovard
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Professor Lockdown Now Claims to Have Saved 3.1 Million Lives
“Whether used by Imperial College or Trump, this line of argument falters as social science because it assumes the validity of the very same forecast it purports to demonstrate. Rather than testing the causal inference that lockdowns reduced the COVID death rate, it takes their own forecasted death rate as a given and then purports to calculate the number of lives saved by simple subtraction from its own model.” ~ Phil Magness
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Ownership Is Not a Bundle
” If property is a bundle of a finite number of previously separate use-rights, put together by government (the bundler), then in what sense does the government ever tread on liberty?” ~ Dan Klein
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The Simple Logic of Free Markets and Retaliation
“If the U.S. retaliates against Chinese industrial policy with American industrial policy, both countries end up in the box in the lower left-hand corner – for each, the worst possible outcome.” ~ Donald Boudreaux
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The Struggle Over “Basic Economics”
“If any economist in the classical tradition, from Smith to Hayek, ever argued that free markets and competition yielded “perfect” outcomes, I am not aware of it. But the mathematical and graphical modelling of perfect competition and “supply and demand” stand as the gutted remains of basic economics.” ~ Max Gulker
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Good Riddance to “Basic Life Skills”
“We are able to lead fuller and richer lives thanks to the global division of labor, and the “basic” life skills about which so many people fret are, it turns out, not so basic after all.” ~ Art Carden
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How a Free Society Deals with Pandemics, According to Legendary Epidemiologist and Smallpox Eradicator Donald Henderson
“We have a very thin record of writings that make the case that freedom, market forces, and private governance are better than government quarantines and closures in dealing with pandemics. So where do we turn for better arguments and a better case?” ~ Edward Stringham
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There Will Be No Recovery Without Production
An essential purpose of allowing markets to be free and open in all circumstances is precisely to take advantage of what people can imagine, create, and produce to meet changing patterns of demand in their respective corners of society in ways that others might not and, indeed, cannot anticipate.
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We Don’t Need One Big Plan to End the Lockdown
The transition back to normal life involves the coordination of the disparate and often-incompatible plans of billions of minds–and if we wish for that coordination to make the best use of knowledge in society, we are making a mistake if we are looking for a plan.
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The Struggle for Science in Demented Times
During a crisis, fate appears to hang in the balance, and mental and material resources must be coordinated and that requires a commander who is in control of the process. But that will not work if curiosity is squashed in the effort to courageously command.
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