Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

England in a coma

City Journal reflects on the following statement by Morrissey from a recent interview with the New Musical Express:

Britain’s a terribly negative place. And it hammers people down and it pulls you back and it prevents you. Also, with the issue of immigration, it’s very difficult because although I don’t have anything against people from other [...]

The eternal quest to fix prices

If there is one single belief that unites most political thinking throughout the history of mankind it is that prices for goods and services cannot simply reflect supply and demand but should be manipulated to  achieve more grandiose goals. Although mankind has gone through numerous cycles of fixing prices, discovering the unintended consequences, and reluctantly [...]

Politicians in panic

Dick Morris on using fear and panic to expand government power:

Why does Obama preach gloom and doom? Because he is so anxious to cram through every last spending bill, tax increase on the so-called rich, new government regulation, and expansion of healthcare entitlement that he must preserve the atmosphere of crisis as a political necessity. [...]

Neo-liberalism’s dead end street blues

The legal scholar Frank van Dun has written an insightful essay in Libertarian Papers about the unfortunate identification of liberalism with utilitarian-pragmatic policy making. His analysis is helpful for explaining why some liberal ideas became popular and others remained ignored.  Van Dun touches upon the heart of the matter when he writes that politicians like

Margaret [...]

A technocratic dictatorship

Arnold Kling writes:

Starting last September, our country has gone through six months that shook the world. We have abandoned free markets. We have abandoned democracy, in the sense of having policies that reflect the popular will. The United States has become a technocratic dictatorship.

The current administration is a government by “experts.” But as Nassim Nicholas [...]

Curing “rights talk” with more “rights talk”

John Gray reviews Dominic Raab’s The Assault on Liberty: What went Wrong with Rights and makes an important observation:

Ironically, while he astutely criticizes the rise of a legalistic culture of rights, Raab seems to believe we can extricate ourselves from our present predicament through another exercise in legalism. Yet [...]

Capitalist Counter-Revolution

A conversation with Anthony de Jasay

Cooking the books

A Short History of the National Debt:
It has been widely noted that 2009 will have the first “trillion-dollar deficit” in American history. Actually it’s the second. In fiscal 2008, the national debt increased from $9 trillion to slightly over $10 trillion. Yet the budget deficit in the last fiscal year was officially reported as being [...]

Randomness and business cycles

Todd A. Knoop’s Recessions and Depressions: Understanding Business Cycles contains a useful observation about the effect of random shocks on business cycles that merits quotation:

It might seem strange that random shocks to productivity can create business cycle swings. Shouldn’t every negative shock be quickly offset by some positive shock? The answer is, no. Economists and [...]

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