Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

Deficit spending as something else

David Friedman on the power of names:

Everyone—including Obama, back when he was running for President—is against deficit spending. Relabel it “stimulus” and everyone is for it. The label neatly evades the question of whether having the government borrow money and spend it is actually a way of getting out of a recession—a claim for which [...]

Noam Chomsky comments on the financial crisis

From a recent interview with Noam Chomsky:

It is a worldwide crisis and it is very serious. It is striking that the ways that Western countries are approaching the crisis [entirely contradict] the model that they enforce on the Third World when there is a crisis. So when Indonesia has a crisis, [or] Argentina and everyone [...]

Murray Rothbard’s obscure case for the obvious

Libertarians are not doing themselves a favor by taking on the burden of proof to argue for something that most people take for granted. Bryan Caplan makes a similar point about Murray Rothbard’s defense of “libertarian rights:”

I object that anything that people do is ipso facto “natural,” so there’s no way you’re going to get [...]

Stimulating monkey brains

At Overcoming Bias Patri Friedman observes:
In the ancestral environment, pulling together to help the tribe in a time of crisis was the best way for an individual to survive.  In our modern environment, however, we are often led to identify with an entire nation as our “tribe”, and it turns out that this is an [...]

Karl Popper’s authoritarian social technologies

Karl Popper is known for his influential contributions to the philosophy of science and critical rationalism.  Unfortunately, his attempt to apply critical rationalism to political philosophy produced writings of a more impatient and dubious nature. For example, in 1960 Popper wrote:

..the empiricist’s questions ‘How do you know? What is the source of your assertion?’ are [...]

Barack Obama versus Michael Bakunin

There are great expectations about the ability of academics to shape society by “smart” policies. The anarchist Michael Bakunin had not much useful to say about economics but he was a realistic observer of intellectuals and power:

Suppose a learned academy, composed of the most illustrious representatives of science; suppose this academy charged with legislation for [...]

Crass Keynesianism

A recurrent comment about public policies inspired by Keynesian economics is that they are crass or vulgar. Instead of seeing a complicated  and unpredictable interplay of individuals pursuing their own ends, society is perceived as a giant machine (“the economy”) that needs to be manipulated to produce specific policy outcomes (“economic growth”).  Public policies inspired [...]

The consequentialist consensus

Don Boudreaux writes:

It’s no ethical challenge to support something that works.  It is, however, a real ethical challenge to oppose something that you believe would work.  Someone opposed as a matter of principle to government intervention into the economy might be sensible or not; but if that person sticks by his or her principles — [...]

Assumptions in economic science

Economists are often taken to task for creating models that employ assumptions that are not consistent with reality. Such reality checks are important and can protect economists from making policy recommendations that may follow from their models but not from empirical observation.
A good example is the private provision of public goods. Most orthodox economic theories [...]

Pavlov’s dogs of stimulus

In his latest column “To Spend or Not to Spend,” Anthony de Jasay discusses the current plans to borrow and spend our way out of economic recession. A central place in such policy proposals is taken by the renewed enthusiasm for Keynesian economics, a school of economic thinking that appears to have been formulated for [...]

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