Cafe Hayek — where orders emerge

Amnesty Intranational

by Don Boudreaux on May 21, 2013

Here’s a letter to the Christian Science Monitor:

To your reader who opposes amnesty for undocumented immigrants – and, indeed, to all who oppose policies to normalize life in America for those immigrants – I ask a question (Letters, May 21): Should President Obama and Sarah Palin be imprisoned?

Both Mr. Obama and Ms. Palin admit to having smoked marijuana in the past. Smoking marijuana is a criminal offense carrying a punishment of prison time, yet these scofflaws today walk freely amongst us, having violated our laws and paid no penalty for their offense! And, of course, what’s true for Mr. Obama and Ms. Palin is true for many other famous people, such as George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jon Bon Jovi, and Maya Angelou. More generally, an estimated 70 million Americans, famous and not, have smoked pot, with only a tiny fraction ever being prosecuted and brought to justice for doing so. The list of such criminals who brashly walk in our midst unpunished for their blatant disregard of our duly enacted laws is very long.

I don’t really propose locking up Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, Maya Angelou or anyone else for having used illegal drugs. But it’s worth pointing out that we in fact routinely grant such people amnesty for their offenses. Why are poor Hispanics not accorded the same humane treatment for committing “crimes” that are equally as victimless as are the drug-taking “crimes” committed in the past by presidents, governors, celebrated artists, and, quite likely, several of your neighbors and co-workers?

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

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Quotation of the Day…

by Don Boudreaux on May 21, 2013

in Myths and Fallacies

… is from page 227 of Thomas Sowell’s magnificent 1980 volume, Knowledge and Decisions (original emphasis):

When all else fails, believers in this vision [of market economies as systems of exploitation] point to specific activities by capitalist nations that have behaved in ways that are regarded as morally wrong. Whatever the merits of their arguments in particular cases, the abuse of power is too universal an historical phenomenon to be made a defining characteristic of capitalism. It seems especially inappropriate as part of an argument for alternative systems with more concentration of power.

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Abuse of Reasons

by Don Boudreaux on May 20, 2013

in Man of System, Politics

Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Gordon Crovitz reports that Pres. Obama’s “longtime adviser David Axelrod last week blamed a too-big government for the scandals: ‘Part of being president is that there’s so much beneath you that you can’t know because the government is so vast’” (“Big Government Loses Control,” May 20).

Although the reality identified by Mr. Axelrod is inescapable, it is no excuse when offered by people – such as Messrs. Obama and Axelrod – who repeatedly insist that proponents of keeping the size and scope of government strictly limited exaggerate big-government’s dangers.

One cannot legitimately, when seeking to expand state power, assure us that such power will be exercised with sufficient attentiveness to avoid abuse, but then – when reality exposes those assurances as fanciful – plead innocent by noting that the degree of attentiveness necessary to prevent abuse is humanly impossible.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

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Epstein on the Constitution

by Russ Roberts on May 20, 2013

in Law, Legal Issues, Podcast

This week’s EconTalk is Richard Epstein talking about the Constitution. My first question:

How has the role of the Constitution changed in the United States since the founding? How has our understanding of it evolved, good and bad? And that, of course, we could spend 7 or 8 hours on, but why don’t you open us up with a general overview of the biggest trends.

What do you think is answer was? I was prepared for him to say that over time, we’ve increasingly ignored the Constitution and done whatever we want. That wasn’t his answer. Check it out.

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Quotation of the Day…

by Don Boudreaux on May 20, 2013

in History, Man of System

… is from page 129 of Arthur Ekirch’s important (if flawed in some of its economics) 1974 volume, Progressivism in America:

An aristocrat who scorned the plutocracy of new-rich money grubbers, T.R. [Teddy Roosevelt] was also a bureaucrat who valued government or military service as opposed to a career in industry or banking. Thus he criticized mere wealth-getting and the material comforts of the middle class, while he gloried in army life and upper-class culture. Later, when he traveled in Europe, it was this side of his nature that made him popular with the monarchs and nobility of the Old World.

Regular readers of this blog know how greatly I admire and am influenced by the work of Deirdre McCloskey. Re-reading the above paragraph from Ekirch reminds me, though, of one very small remark that Deirdre makes on page 70 of her 2006 volume, The Bourgeois Virtues, that caused me to scratch my head: Deirdre there describes Teddy Roosevelt as “admirable.” I found when I read Virtues - and continue to find – her description of T.R. anomalous, especially in light of Deirdre’s thesis that our modern prosperity owes its existence to such an acceptance and celebration of the bourgeois virtues that the bourgeoisie, finally, came to enjoy in the popular mind the dignity that they so richly deserve. T. Roosevelt was anything but an admirer of the full range of bourgeois virtues; he regarded bourgeois pursuits and successes as being contemptible beside the likes of warrior-ing, aristocrat-ing, and bureaucrat-ing.

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Quotation of the Day…

by Don Boudreaux on May 19, 2013

in Complexity & Emergence, Innovation, Myths and Fallacies

… is from pages 224-225 of Milton Friedman’s and Daniel Boorstin’s 1951 or 1952 essay, “How to plan and pay for the safe and adequate highways we need” – an essay that was lost for decades until one of these authors, in 1988, found the original; it wasn’t published until it appeared as the Epilogue in Gabriel Roth’s 1996 book, Roads in a Market Economy:

The accepted approach to this problem [of highway provision] is an illustration of the way in which the proponents of our free enterprise system accept the role which is given them by their opponents – a role as fighters of a rear-guard action against socialism. While they devote their energies to preventing further encroachment by government, they take for granted that those areas in which government is at any moment operating must be so operated. Those of us who believe in free enterprise should show as much imagination, intellectual daring, and willingness to experiment in extending the scope of free enterprise as the opponents of free enterprise have shown in seeking to extend the power of the state. If we do, we shall find that much now being done by the state could better be done by free enterprise.

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A Conditioned Response?

by Don Boudreaux on May 18, 2013

in Economics, Hubris and humility, Nanny State

Here’s a letter to an e-mail correspondent. I use his real name with his kind permission.

Jeremy Harris, M.D.

Dear Dr. Harris:

Thanks for e-mailing in response to my recent review of Cass Sunstein’s book Simpler. While I disagree with the thrust of your argument, I appreciate its civility and thoughtfulness.

The heart of your criticism is your claim that I “ultimately deny the significance” of behavioral economics.

No and yes. I don’t deny the worth of learning more about human behavior. I don’t deny that some economists forget that homo economicus is an analytical tool and not a description of, or a prescription for, real people. I don’t deny that behavioral economics gives us a richer and worthwhile picture of the reality of human action.

But I do deny two things. First, I deny that the best of economics is done in ways that make it, at its core, vulnerable to the findings of behavioral economics. Not only is homo economicus an appropriate analytical tool on many occasions, but also, a great many ‘non-behavioral’ economists (and nearly all Austrian economists) often model human decision-making with more richness and realism than behavioral economists think. Read, for example, Adam Smith, F.A. Hayek, Ronald Coase, James Buchanan, Thomas Sowell, and Deirdre McCloskey.

Second, I deny that behavioral economics strengthens the case for government regulation. Indeed, I believe that it weakens that case. Because the regulators have the same psychological foibles as the regulatees – yet face far less direct feedback on their decisions than do those whom they regulate – turning more decision-making power over to government increases the frequency of human error and amplifies its ill-effects. Markets keep those errors less numerous and their effects more confined.

Human beings are not laboratory rats to be controlled and conditioned by some elite of their number who, somehow and without explanation, manage to become higher-order creatures simply by working for government and professing deep concern for the welfare of their lab animals.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

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Quotation of the Day…

by Don Boudreaux on May 18, 2013

in Complexity & Emergence, Creative destruction

… is from page 108 of Peter Drucker’s 1967 volume, The Effective Executive:

The need to slough off the outworn old to make possible the productive new is universal. It is reasonably certain that we would still have stagecoaches – nationalized, to be sure, heavily subsidized, and with a fantastic research program to ‘retrain the horse’ – had there been ministries of transportation around 1825.

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Thomas Sowell Interviewed by Uncommon Knowledge’s Peter Robinson

by Don Boudreaux on May 18, 2013

in Economics, Myths and Fallacies, Scientism, Video

Thomas Sowell, in his voluminous writings, is – on my understanding – sometimes wrong. But he’s wrong only rarely. Very rarely. And on those very many occasions when he’s right he is brilliantly insightful and impressively forceful in his argument.

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Some Links

by Don Boudreaux on May 17, 2013

in Books, Civil Society, Curious Task, Growth, Hayek, Health, Hubris and humility, Immigration, Trade

Richard Epstein lays the lumber to Obamacare. Here’s his opening sentence:

On Friday, May 10, President Obama ventured into Ohio to give a Mother’s Day defense of the sagging fortunes of his signal achievement, the misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The law, the President assures us, “is here to stay”—a comment that is best regarded as a threat and not a promise.

Mark Perry appropriately praises an unsung major technology advance: the shipping container. Also, one of the commenters to Mark’s post appropriately mentioned Mark Levinson’s excellent book of a few years ago on this topic – a book entitled The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger.) And fortunately – after a half-century or so of very little improvement – the shipping container looks to be on the verge of making a substantial leap forward in efficiency, versatility, and reliability. If so, the world will become even smaller and the world economy even bigger. In a world more economically informed and less prone to worshiping as saviors allegedly Great Men or Great Women, Malcom McLean and the other individuals who played a large role in making the shipping container a reality would be, with far more frequency than are politicians and military generals, celebrated with boulevards bearing their names, currencies (privately issued, of course!) bearing their likenesses, and anthems singing their praises.

Rob Bradley explains why Hayek understood economics better than does T. Boone Pickens. (Back in 2008 I wrote on a similar matter, but with less eloquence than Rob.)

Here’s Jonah Goldberg on the current I.R.S. scandal.

Over at Libertarianism.org, George Smith is up to part 5 of his series on defending the non-aggression principle. Here’s part one (with links to the subsequent parts easily found). (HT Walter Grinder)

I’m eager to read Alvaro Vargas Llosa’s Global Crossings.

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