Public choice is the application of economic methods to analyze political decision-making. Prior to the public choice revolution, academic and policy analysts tended to assume that once an “optimal” course of action was identified, government would follow that course of action. Public choice recognizes that government decision-makers may not have sufficient information to identify…
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Economics provides a powerful framework for understanding what goes on in the marketplace, the voting booth, the family, the community, and every other sphere of social activity. Its greatest teachers—from before Adam Smith on down to the present—have always impressed upon the public their discipline’s explanatory powers and importance for human well-being. In his…
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Updated*. On November 11, 1918, the world finally had enough of the irrational killing spree known as World War I. Fifteen million individual human beings had perished in what was the largest military conflict the world had yet seen. Armistice Day, marking the end of the war, was declared a holiday by the Allied…
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In the 1980s, many prominent conservatives spoke openly in favor of liberalizing immigration. It was Ronald Reagan, after all, who was responsible for the United States’s last mass amnesty. The left was often skeptical about immigrants. Unionists opposed the free labor competition. Environmentalists and population controllers were among the most vocal advocates of restrictionism….
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Norm Ormstein, AEI scholar and writer of most of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Law (2002), has an interesting observation relating to the success of non-establishment candidates in GOP primaries. “Out go the country-club Republicans like Mitt Romney, in come the grass-roots revolutionaries like Sarah Palin…America just became a lot more ungovernable than it already…
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In the current issue of Books & Culture, Professor Paul Harvey (not to be confused with the late radio icon) takes aim at my “imagined” (read: invented) tradition of classical liberalism on race. You can read his full review here. Harvey concedes that Race and Liberty in America rediscovers “understudied authors.” Then he quickly…
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With so much press coverage of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Nobel Prize in economics has not been discussed much. I am an economist, but I’m not really complaining. The other prizes haven’t received much press coverage either, and most people don’t have that much interest in economics anyway. (That’s not to say they’re…
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I used to love Franken on Saturday Night Live. Although his Stuart Smally character got old very quickly, he did a wonderful Paul Tsongas impression. I’d link to an example on YouTube, but NBC takes its intellectual property very seriously and therefore hundreds of the most humorous bits ever to air on late night…
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Just when it looked like statism was in an unchallenged political trajectory in the U.S. and Europe, the classical liberal President of the Czech Republic, Dr. Václav Klaus, stands to become the next President of the European Union, the world’s biggest trading bloc. Needless to say, those who F. A. Hayek dubbed “the socialists…
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According to a news report about Paul Krugman’s selection to receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences: Commenting on the global economic meltdown, Krugman told a news conference in Stockholm by telephone from the United States that some of his research was linked to currency crises and related issues. “This is terrifying,” he…
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