Against Politics

Toward a depoliticized society

Politicized money

Monetary policy is governed by the rule of men, rather than the rule of law. The results are what public choice theory would predict and monetary history has documented: booms, busts, and panics.

writes Gerald P. O’Driscoll Jr. in Money and the Present Crisis (PDF).
In the same issue of the Cato Journal about lessons from the [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The political philosophy of bailout

All politics is redistributive. Although this is often hidden from view through appeals to the social contract, democracy, and the common good, the recent attempts to reward unsound business practices with taxpayers’ money make even the most sophisticated appeal to the “common good” look suspicious. Although advocates of liberty have offered persuasive accounts about the [...]