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Bob Higgs poses four questions to those with political power.

David Boaz reflects on the socialist paradises of Cuba and Venezuela.

Jonathan Adler proposes a better approach to environmental policy.

Mark Perry exposes the myth that high CEO pay causes the pay of ordinary workers to stagnate.

Tim Carney, like me, hopes his children don’t grow up to be politicians.  A slice:

But I hope you’ll pardon me if I don’t encourage my daughter, any more than my sons, to follow Hillary Clinton’s footsteps. As I watched her speech Tuesday, my first thought was that I don’t want any of my children to be president of the United States. Instead of being an inspirational story for young girls, Hillary Clinton’s path to her current heights should be seen as a cautionary tale of the corrupting nature of power and ambition.

Heres’ the abstract of a new paper by my colleague Pete Boettke and GMU Econ PhD candidate Rosolino Candela:

Our contribution in this chapter is to address the argument made by philosopher Samuel Freeman (2001) that libertarianism is not a liberal view. Freeman’s argument is based on the claim that full alienability of property rights is antithetical to liberal political institutions. We address Freeman’s argument by arguing twofold. First, although he derives a logically valid theory of libertarianism, which indeed has illiberal implications, Freeman’s account of libertarianism mistakenly conflates an absolute notion of private property and contract with liberty itself. Second, we argue that private property and freedom of contract are necessary, but not sufficient for a liberal view of libertarianism. Sufficient for a liberal view of libertarianism is a framework of general and universally applicable rules that exhibit neither discrimination nor dominion over individuals before the law, i.e. liberty. The right to private property and contract are normatively laden principles, yet contextual and endogenous to a political framework that gives space to exchange and human flourishing. Ultimately, what Freeman is criticizing is an illiberal view of libertarianism that structures atomistic interaction, one where human interaction is passively based on a logical derivation of the non-aggression axiom. Our account is that libertarianism, properly understood, is a liberal view that structures social interaction, one where human interaction is open-ended and exchange is initiated by individuals’ purposive plans.

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