My colleague Pete Boettke writes eloquently of our late, great colleague Gordon Tullock. A slice:
A lot can be understood simply by recognizing that individuals strive to achieve the best they can as they perceive it, rather than asserting that they achieve best outcomes in their actions. And, similarly, a lot can be understood by stressing the evolution towards a solution involved in market and social interactions rather than focusing exclusively on solution states. But the price of that understanding is predicative power in social science. Tullock, though, was part of a generation of thinkers who understood that while measurement could be an important aspect of science, it didn’t exhaust science. The problem with the plea that if something is important, measure it, is that work-a-day social scientists will start to believe that whatever they can measure is important. Tullock, unlike the next generation of scholars in economics and political economy, relied on multiple forms of evidence to illustrate and illuminate, and did not restrict his work to only those questions amenable to parsimonious models and sophisticated statistical techniques.
Mary Anastasia O’Grady busts some Trumpian myths about NAFTA. A slice:
The pushback against Mr. Trump’s Nafta assault is not coming from “coastal elites” contemptuous of what they refer to as “flyover country.” It’s coming from the “flyover” industrial and farming heartland itself, which has the most to lose.
Pierre Lemieux uncovers the hubris-slathered history of a government program.
My colleague Bryan Caplan explains why we so little “reverse grandfathering” in government policies.
Here’s Ryan Bourne on the GOP tax plan.
And here’s Richard Epstein on tax reform.
In this video, my colleague Dan Klein explores Adam Smith and liberalism.
