Statism I
In analyzing what is wrong with current thinking about our political order, one of the basic concepts that I employ is statism. Yet few people, including libertarians and conservatives, talk very much...
View ArticleStatism II
In my previous post, Statism I, I defined statism as an excessive and harmful embrace of the power of the state. Today, as a means of showing how prevalent statism is, I want to show how statism has...
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Statism III
In my first post on statism, I defined the concept as an excessive and harmful embrace of the power of the state. In my second post, I attempted to show statism functions as a bias in economics – the...
View ArticleMore on Statism
The most recent edition of the Liberty Forum involves a discussion of behavioral law and economics, the subject of a couple of my posts on statism. See here and here. In these posts, I noted that...
View ArticleBleeding Heart Libertarianism, Utilitarianism, and Statism
Do bleeding heart libertarians have an argument against statism? My concern is that they do not. Take Mike Rappaport. He writes that “[1] I have always been a Bleeding Heart Libertarian who is...
View ArticleWho Built That Prosperous Society?
In the hope that not everyone has become bored with the debate about President Obama’s statement that “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that,” I thought I would add my own two cents. From...
View ArticleStatism and Behavioral Economics
A while back I wrote a couple of posts about the statist bias of behavioral economics. While its central assumption was that decisionmakers often did not behave rationally, it almost never applied its...
View ArticleAre Bureaucrats Free of Cognitive Bias?
You would think so from reading most of the literature on normative behavioral economics. Private actors make mistakes, but bureaucrats don’t. (What bias is at work here?) I was therefore happy to...
View ArticleTrump’s First Achievement: Making Obama Not Great
One way of understanding American history is as a struggle between consequential Presidents who expand liberty and consequential Presidents who expand the state. On this view, most Presidents are...
View ArticleThaler’s Bias
As everyone knows, Richard Thaler has won the Nobel Prize in economics. Thaler’s prize was mainly for behavioral economics, which built upon the work of the earlier nobel laureate Daniel Kanneman....
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