Roger Meiners explains that we cannot regulate ourselves into a state of prosperity.
Matt Ridley reviews Bill Easterly’s new book, The Tyranny of Experts. A slice:
The decades-old view that conscious policy design offers the best hope for ending poverty, is just another a form of creationism, embodying the fallacy of intelligent design – that because something is ordered and intricate, it must have been ordained by an intelligent mind. In fact, as Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek (and Charles Darwin) realised, no expert can ever know enough to rival the information that emerges from the spontaneous interactions of many people.
But what so few people seem to understand is that virtually all their horror stories about drugs occurred during a time when drugs were illegal. That is not in itself a slam-dunk argument for legalization. Much more is needed to make the case against the drug war. But if all these horror stories occurred during the drug war, it is hard to see how people can so easily think that these horror stories are an argument for the drug war.
Richard Epstein discusses property rights.
The wise Hans Eicholz discusses Scottish independence.
