Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

The political and the primitive

“The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes primitive again.”
Joseph Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy

Anthony de Jasay on the financial crisis

In his recent columns on the 2008 financial crisis, the economist and political philosopher Anthony de Jasay discusses a number of topics including the uninformed, sensational and self-fulfilling reporting of the mainstream media about the current economic climate, the non-trivial contribution of government regulation to the financial crisis, and the consequentialist thinking about the economy [...]

Calculating GDP

Greg Mankiw writes:
If the government hires people to produce stuff that is worthless, that stuff is included in GDP just as much as if the government buys something valuable. When calculating GDP, the national income accountants do not pass judgment on the social utility of government spending. Anyone concerned with economic well-being has to go [...]

Game theoreticians weigh in on financial crisis

In November 2008 the Nobel laureate economist Robert Aumann spoke at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies and expressed concern about the faulty proposals to solve the financial crisis. His talk is now available on YouTube:

In October 2008, another game theoretician and Nobel Prize winner, John Nash Jr. weighed in on the financial crisis [...]

The New Deal disaster

The conventional wisdom is that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal got the United States out of the Great Depression. The most obvious objection to this view would be epistemological in nature. How do we know what would have happened without the New Deal? Strictly speaking, we cannot know this through empirical means. This feature of evaluating [...]

Market fundamentalism

A recent trend in progressive thinking is to accuse opponents of “market fundamentalism.” That seems to be a smart rhetorical tactic because a) it rides on the wave of concerns about any kind of fundamentalism, and b) the phrase appeals to people’s reasonableness. After all, if two ways of “organizing society” are available, only a [...]

The presumption of liberty

Perhaps no political philosopher has done as much painstaking work to review the legitimacy and need for political authority as Anthony de Jasay.  What makes de Jasay’s work stand out is his ability to engage with the technical arguments of political economists and philosophers without sacrificing common sense. For example, de Jasay understands the complications [...]

Bryan Caplan on the media

In his excellent book The Myth of the Rational Voter, Bryan Caplan writes “like politicians, the media show viewers what they want to see and tell them what they want to hear” and speculates about the possibility that voters’ beliefs about other topics than economics may not be any sounder.
When I find mistakes in newspaper [...]

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste

On the Cato@Liberty blog David Boaz observes how opinion makers and politicians prepare to exploit the current financial crisis to implement regulatory policies and entitlements programs that would not get broad support in calmer times:

So . . . Emanuel. Krugman. Huffington. They’re all rallying around the theme that, well, that a left-liberal government should use [...]

Liberty Fitz-Claridge’s libertarian song

On the Samizdata blog, the up-and-coming female libertarian writer Liberty Fitz-Claridge has published “The Libertarian Song:”
I am the very model of a modern libertarian;
I’m at the Diamond’s farthest corner from ‘Authoritarian’.
and
We liberals won’t rest until all state-run works are privatised;
From ports to courts, from wealth to health, we want the state to be downsized.
These things [...]

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