Some Links

by Don Boudreaux on March 23, 2017

On April 12th in New York City, the Soho Forum will host a debate between George Selgin and Josh Barro on the resolution “The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation should be abolished in favor of private sector solutions for protecting the safety of bank deposits.” George will argue in the affirmative.

Matt Ridley remembers Hayek, who died 25 years ago today. A slice:

By contrast, trade creates a collective problem-solving brain as big as the trade network itself. It draws [as Hayek taught] upon dispersed and fragmented knowledge to create things that nobody can even comprehend, wholes that are more complex than the sum of their individual mental parts.

No other animal does this. There is exchange and specialisation within families, even huge families such as ant colonies, which gives an ant colony considerable collective intelligence. But that’s among kin. Exchange between strangers is a unique feature of us modern hominids. As Adam Smith said, “no man ever saw a dog make fair and deliberate exchange of a bone with another dog”.

David Boaz also remembers Hayek.

Matthew Fay warns that Trump’s embrace of economic nationalism and its half-witted offspring, mercantilism, might prove to be far more than merely economically calamitous.

Speaking of mercantilism, Kristofer Harrison exposes Big Steel in the U.S. a long-time corporate-welfare queen.

Russ Roberts’s latest EconTalk podcast is with Columbia University statistician Andrew Gellman.

Elaine Schwartz argues that more immigration will improve the solvency of the U.S. Social Security program.

Let’s all join with Mark Perry on Saturday to celebrate Human Achievement Hour (rather than with the historically and economically ignorant who will celebrate Earth Hour).

Here’s the video of my colleague Bryan Caplan’s debate (at the University of San Diego) with Christopher Wellman on the question of whether or not immigration is a basic human right: