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My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy rightly applauds the timelessness and importance of the work of the late GMU economist Don Lavoie. A slice:

In [his 1985 book] National Economic Planning, Lavoie explains how the knowledge problem — that is, the inability of government planners to access the detailed and decentralized bits of economic information whose use is required for an economy to achieve anything remotely close to an efficient allocation of resources and, ultimately, to grow — thwarts even the sort of piecemeal planning that was being advocated by many intellectuals even as late as the 1980s. In addition, Lavoie argued that inherent to government planning is the requirement that individuals grant to planners such enormous amounts of control and power that freedom itself cannot survive in their presence.

Richard Ebeling explains that conservative nationalism is hostile to liberty. A slice:

But how do most people come to have these senses of national loyalty and national common identity? A central part of this process is the imposed and compulsory educational systems that have been an increasing hallmark of all nation-states over the last 200 years. The governments in each country consider it an essential duty and responsibility to indoctrinate the new generation in what it means to be a German, a Frenchman, an Italian, a Japanese, a Nigerian, a Mexican, or an American.

Shikha Dalmia astutely observes that those having the most trouble assimilating in America are not immigrants to America but American conservative nationalists. A slice:

Given how zealously the American right has guarded America’s core freedoms from foreigners, it is beyond ironic that it elected a president who tramples on them on a daily basis.

While conservatives have been worrying about importing socialism from abroad, Trump is foisting on the country what Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek, a conservative hero (until now), considered its equally dangerous collectivist twin, economic nationalism.

James Pethokoukis bemoans what he accurately calls “the GOP’s stupid swoon for big government.

Here’s Gary Galles on Eric Hoffer on the “haves” and “have nots.

My Mercatus Center colleague Matt Mitchell discusses rent seeking and the work of the late, great Gordon Tullock.

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