Tom Woods talks with David Hart about Frederic Bastiat.
Jeff Jacoby observes that Obamacare has already failed.
Shikha Dalmia is correct: today’s GOP hates immigrants more than it hates big government.
Marian Tupy decries the totalitarian instincts of many environmentalists.
From 1987: David Henderson on James M. Buchanan.
Here’s Steve Horwitz’s full-length review of Nancy Maclean’s fictional tract, Democracy in Chains. A slice:
It is clear throughout the book that MacLean simply does not have the intellectual background and tools to understand the ideas she is dealing with. She is not familiar enough with the economic and political theory, nor the social science more broadly, to understand the contexts and questions that motivate Buchanan’s research and that of public choice theorists in general. Buchanan’s intellectual context is not the South, either in the form of the Southern Agrarians … or the slavery-defending Calhoun. The real context, made clear with a quick look at any of his major works, was figuring out how people choose in groups, and especially how choices can be made through the political process in ways that ensure that all voices get heard. Central to Buchanan’s thought was the importance of consent in politics. One way to view his project is that it was an attempt to explain how non-market decision-making processes might also be made “mutually beneficial” in the way that market exchanges are. That is, how can we make it such that decisions made outside the market are ones that benefit all parties?
