Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

Government-run health care by another name

The co-ops that are being proposed to bring more choice and competition to health care are just the “public option” by another name and will drive private insurers out of business. As Michael T. Tanner writes for the Cato Institute:
If a “co-op” is run by the federal government under rules imposed by the federal government [...]

Ages of laborious research

Terence W. Hutchison’s Significance and Basic Postulates of Economic Theory (1938) quotes John Elliott Cairnes on the methodology of economics as saying, “The economist starts with a knowledge of ultimate causes. He is already, at the outset of his enterprise, in the position the physicist only attains after ages of laborious research…”.
Hutchison responds to his [...]

IQ and the wealth of nations

Jason Richwine reports on Robert Putnam’s reluctant finding that “the more ethnically diverse a community is, the less social capital it possesses” and suggests that our immigration policies should be altered in favor of preferring skilled immigrants with high IQ’s because

higher IQ people appear to be more morally sophisticated, altruistic, and forward-looking. They exhibit higher [...]

Carl Menger and the exact science of economics

In Significance and Basic Postulates of Economic Theory (1938) Terence W. Hutchison presents a logical-empiricist perspective on economic methodology and takes specific issue with Austrian economists who believe that economic theories cannot and should not be falsified through empirical testing. In the chapter “The Application of Pure Theory” Hutchison criticizes Carl Menger’s view of what [...]

Progressives discover scarcity

In a witty post about government rationing versus market “rationing” Megan Mcardle notes that:

there is also a real difference between having something rationed by a process and having it rationed by a person…Using the government’s coercive power to decide the price of something, or who ought to get it, is qualitatively different from the same [...]

Medicaid socialism in Oregon

From the Independent Institute Patient Power website:

Tom Palmer on G.A. Cohen

Unlike some of his libertarian colleagues, Tom Palmer does not have a favorable impression of Cohen’s objectives or his personal ethics.  Analytical marxists like Cohen have contributed a lot to demolish orthodox Marxism but they have never stopped looking for new arguments to support most of the same old conclusions, a practice that seems to [...]