Mine and thine cannot be, except this be: No man hath power over my rights and liberties, and I over no man’s.
DBx: Indeed so.
Of all of Richard Epstein’s many excellent books, my favorite remains his 1995 volume, Simple Rules for a Complex World. No such rule is more essential to a thriving civilization than the one articulated above by Overton.
Here’s a letter to a college student who “can’t understand [my] zealotry” for free trade:
Mr. Evan Dunlap
Mr. Dunlap:
You ask why I insist that there are no losers from international trade. Your question is fair, for such an insistence does, I confess, emit the odor of what you call “zealotry.” But I stand by my insistence. Let me repeat here one of the key justifications for my stand; it’s a justification that takes seriously the impact that language has on our understanding of reality.
To say – as many say – that “international trade has losers” conveys the impression that what are called the “losses” from international trade are unique to such trade. Yet this impression of the uniqueness of international-trade’s downsides is false in at least two related ways.
First, restricting trade destroys – and prevents the creation of – as many jobs as trade itself destroys and prevents from being created. Second and more fundamentally, in free markets it is not really international trade that destroys particular jobs; it is economic competition. In any economy in which sellers are free to compete for consumers’ patronage – and consumers are free to respond to such competition – some particular jobs will be destroyed while others are created. Jobs will constantly churn.
Competition from sellers located in foreign jurisdictions is only one of innumerable specific manifestations of competition that destroys (and creates) jobs in the domestic economy. Therefore, to say that ‘trade with foreigners – competition from foreigners – destroys jobs’ is no more or less true than to say that ‘trade with Arizonans destroys jobs’ or that ‘trade with blue-eyed people destroys jobs’ or that ‘trade with women destroys jobs.’ You can say such a thing, and it will have in it a kernel of truth – but the impression conveyed will be wholly false. It is simply untrue both that such trade is unique at destroying particular jobs, and that the destruction of particular jobs will necessarily be reduced by government obstacles to such trade.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
The problem is not a lack of tax revenue, but over-centralization, duplication and mismanagement of the revenue the government already collects. Both the House and Senate tax bills are incomplete steps in the right direction and should yield substantially higher growth. Other countries have shown that it is possible to have a prosperous economy, a high degree of liberty, and the people well protected with much lower levels of taxation and government expenditure.
However – and here is a little challenge – the distinction between “natural” and “artificial” conditions is not as neat as one might think. Some geographical conditions can be changed by human entrepreneurship or government intervention. If hothouses have been built with a government subsidy and their cost is sunk, don’t they now represent a comparative advantage? Ski resorts can be built and artificial snow made, possibly with government subsidies. Ignorant people can be instructed, even in government schools. Moreover, some phenomena straddle the distinction between the natural and the artificial, that is, phenomena like language, culture, and morals (see chapter 1 of Friedrich Hayek‘s vol. 1 of Law, Legislation and Liberty).
To be sure, the American left overplayed its hand by insisting on a forced program of diversity on college campuses and elsewhere. But the right’s program of forced homogeneity based on a tendentious reading of social science will be far worse.
… is from page 242 of Georgetown University law professor Randy Barnett’s excellent 2016 book, Our Republican Constitution; just before this quotation, Randy quotes Justice William Douglas’s poor excuse in Williamson v. Lee Optical (1955) for U.S. courts to grant near-blanket approval to all legislative regulations of business-consumer interactions:
Traditionally, a law that was not “logically consistent with its aims” was literally irrational and therefore unconstitutional. Now it was perfectly constitutional. In this way were courts deprived of the means by which they could assess whether a statute was within the just powers of a legislature to enact, and to do so without needing to carefully identify and circumscribe a “fundamental right.” Gone now was an enforceable requirement that a law be “rational.”
DBx: Adding insult to this grievous injury of a U.S. Constitution neutered in its ability to restrain state power is the fact that the resulting standard that American courts now apply when determining if legislatively imposed economic restrictions meet constitutional muster is called the “rational-basis test.”
I recall my Constitutional Law professor at UVA, David Martin – who is no libertarian – say that a better name for the “rational-basis test” is the “not-looney test.” Martin meant by this description to convey the fact that the rational-basis test has no teeth. But I think that even “not-looney” fails to capture just how lunatic the rational-basis test is, for legislatures can and routinely do enact diktats that even a looney person is sane enough to understand serve no purpose other than to enrich some people at the expense of others, and to do so simply because those who are enriched have more political muscle than do those who are robbed.
Uber is a great service for riders and it’s also great for people who need a source of flexible earnings. The fact that Uber drivers earn less than some people think is appropriate is a function of the wider job market and not of Uber policy. Indeed, Uber can’t increase take-home pay by raising fares and if we require them to do so we will simply hurt consumers and waste resources without improving the welfare of drivers.
[T]o the extent that existing rights are held to be subject to continuous redefinition by the State, no one has an incentive to organize and to initiate trades or agreements. This amounts to saying that once the body politic begins to get overly concerned about the distribution of the pie under existing property-rights arrangements and legal rules … we are necessarily precluding and forestalling the achievement of potential structural changes that might increase the size of the pie for all. Too much concern for “justice” acts to ensure that “growth” will not take place, and for reasons much more basic than the familiar economic incentives argument.
DBx: It’s a point that should be obvious, but given all too much economic-policy discussion today, it obviously isn’t. The state is nearly always regarded by “Progressives” (and often so also by conservatives) as a giant device that determines how an assumed-to-exist economic pie is sliced. Too little attention is paid to how rules might be altered in ways that enable everyone to have a good prospect of getting a larger slice (of what would then be necessarily) an expanding pie. Too much attention is paid to devising, justifying, and engaging in efforts by each of us to use the state to seize stuff from others of us.
And among the most dangerous myths is the widespread belief that as long as state officials are chosen democratically, a seizing of other people’s stuff that would be universally regarded as an atrocious injustice if done privately becomes ethically justified – or even “enlightened” – if done by the state.
A market economy is relatively more efficient for three reasons: It makes the incentives of participants compatible with the generation of economic value; it exploits fully the localized knowledge available only to participants in separated decentralized circumstances; and it allows maximal scope for the creative and imaginative talents of all participants who choose to act as potential entrepreneurs.
Democracy in Chains, which has been thoroughly debunked by left, right, libertarian, and center, is no good-faith critique. It features fabricated quotes, ellipses to flip the meaning of actual quotes, and invents ‘facts’ out of whole cloth.
Enthusiasts for the market process sometimes refer to “the magic of the marketplace.” But there’s no magic involved, just the spontaneous order of peaceful, productive people freely interacting, each seeking his own gain but led to cooperate with others in order to achieve it. It doesn’t happen overnight, but through years and centuries the market process has brought us from a society characterized by backbreaking labor to achieve bare subsistence and an average life expectancy of twenty-five years to today’s truly amazing level of abundance, health, and technology.
Mine and thine cannot be, except this be: No man hath power over my rights and liberties, and I over no man’s.
Traditionally, a law that was not “logically consistent with its aims” was literally irrational and therefore unconstitutional. Now it was perfectly constitutional. In this way were courts deprived of the means by which they could assess whether a statute was within the just powers of a legislature to enact, and to do so without needing to carefully identify and circumscribe a “fundamental right.” Gone now was an enforceable requirement that a law be “rational.”
[T]o the extent that existing rights are held to be subject to continuous redefinition by the State, no one has an incentive to organize and to initiate trades or agreements. This amounts to saying that once the body politic begins to get overly concerned about the distribution of the pie under existing property-rights arrangements and legal rules … we are necessarily precluding and forestalling the achievement of potential structural changes that might increase the size of the pie for all. Too much concern for “justice” acts to ensure that “growth” will not take place, and for reasons much more basic than the familiar economic incentives argument.
A market economy is relatively more efficient for three reasons: It makes the incentives of participants compatible with the generation of economic value; it exploits fully the localized knowledge available only to participants in separated decentralized circumstances; and it allows maximal scope for the creative and imaginative talents of all participants who choose to act as potential entrepreneurs.
Enthusiasts for the market process sometimes refer to “the magic of the marketplace.” But there’s no magic involved, just the spontaneous order of peaceful, productive people freely interacting, each seeking his own gain but led to cooperate with others in order to achieve it. It doesn’t happen overnight, but through years and centuries the market process has brought us from a society characterized by backbreaking labor to achieve bare subsistence and an average life expectancy of twenty-five years to today’s truly amazing level of abundance, health, and technology.
