Speaking of socialism, here’s insight from the great Bob Higgs.
Just how communist is mainland China? (So asks Scott Sumner).
Jeffrey Tucker was recently a guest on Dave Rubin’s show.
John Stossel’s isn’t optimistic about the future of Social Security.
My colleague Pete Boettke explores the labeling problem in economic thought. A slice:
From my perspective, there is a core of the economic way of thinking that can be traced from Adam Smith to Vernon Smith and that deals with basic ideas about human rationality, human sociability, and the coordination of activity through time. Incentives, information, and innovation are part of this core as they derive from the even more primordial ideas of property, prices, and profit-and-loss accounting.
We live in a world of scarcity. Scarcity implies that we face trade-offs, and we must hope to negotiate those trade-offs in the most effective way possible. To achieve that negotiating of trade-offs and coordinate our activities with those of others, who are also negotiating trade-offs, we need aids to the human mind. Those aids come in the form of high-powered incentives and clear signals allowing us to engage in economic calculus.
GMU Econ alum Ryan Young explains that trade barriers hurt especially the poor.
Colin Grabow is correct that the Jones Act makes little sense in a globalized world. (Indeed, it makes sense in no world.)
Tirzah Duren says that protectionism is for losers.
