Culture and economics

Niranjan has this wonderful piece on decoding the red-beacon culture and economics.


Here is another piece by Prof Boudreauk of GMU, USA arguing about "The mass production that is a hallmark of modern market economies is made possible not chiefly by money but by culture and institutions."

“Juvenile delusion” of using senses

Assam is the first State to Guarantee Right to Health in India. It is nothing but bizarre in the Indian society.

As GMU Professor Don Boudreaux put it rightly:

“Talking about “rights” to scarce goods and services sounds right only to persons who are economically illiterate, politically naive, and suffering the juvenile delusion that reality is optional.”

Universal values

Prof Donald Boudreaux on universal liberal values:

“Classical-liberal (or, if you prefer, libertarian) political values are no more than the application to society at large, and to government, of some of the most fundamental and indispensable rules that every decent person learns early in life and adheres to until death.

In this light it is interesting to read a recent observation about libertarianism by University of Virginia government professor Colin Bird. He tries his hand at explaining the increased acceptance, over the past 30 years, of libertarian ideas. In his opinion, this success results from the fact that libertarianism was able to represent itself as the true heir to the liberal mainstream rather than as a revolutionary departure from Western political values. That is not to deny that libertarians often portrayed themselves as radical and even socially progressive: but at root libertarianism claims to be radicalizing the familiar (individualism, freedom, rights) rather than to be familiarizing the truly radical.

Indeed so! Professor Bird, however, believes that radically insisting (as libertarians do) that the government be bound by all of the same basic rules of decency that bind individuals does not really render libertarians radical. As I recently wrote in this space, if by “radical” we mean consistently sticking to sound principles, then libertarians are indeed radical—and radical in a way that deserves praise.”

"Buchanan-esque"

James Buchanan and Virginia school of political economy

Learning to Love Insider Trading

Donald J. Boudreaux single handily defends Raj Rajaratnam’s insider trading.

Is Barack Obama really a socialist?

GMU Professor Donald J. Boudreaux (cafehayek) writes in CSM that “The late Robert Heilbroner – a socialist for most of his life – admitted after the collapse of the Iron Curtain that socialism "was the tragic failure of the twentieth century. Born of a commitment to remedy the economic and moral defects of capitalism, it has far surpassed capitalism in both economic malfunction and moral cruelty."

This failure was unavoidable. It was predicted from the start by wise economists, such as F.A. Hayek, who understood that no government agency can gather and process all the knowledge necessary to plan the productive allocation of millions of different resources”.