What Makes a Miracle: Some myths about the rise of China and India

What Makes a Miracle: Some myths about the rise of China and India

Pranab Bardhan's Boston Review article debunks claims that China and India's economic development is solely due to capitalism: communism, democracy and socialism have also played major parts.

Added to the Government And Economics index.

Shleifer the (Counter-)Revolutionary

Shleifer the (Counter-)Revolutionary

Dani Rodrik ridicules Andrei Shleifer's "Age of Milton Friedman" triumphalism, pointing out how the evidence is misused.

Added to the Milton Friedman index.

Some Capital-Theoretic Fallacies of Austrian Economics

Some Capital-Theoretic Fallacies of Austrian Economics

Robert Vienneau attacks assumptions of Austrian Business Cycle Theory. Highly technical.

Added to the Austrian Economics index.

CFP's Laffer Curve Video

CFP's Laffer Curve Video

Law Professor Linda Beale debunks the latest Laffer Curve propaganda video from the "Center for Freedom and Prosperity" and CATO's Dan Mitchell.

Added to the CATO and Taxation indexes.

Ron Paul's record in Congress

Ron Paul's record in Congress

Ron Paul's bizarre track record as a congressman, particularly those bills he sponsored or co-sponsored.

Thanks to loyal reader Matt Golowenski for the lead to this article at Orcinus.

Market Failures In Everything: US Medical Care

Another in the continuing series mocking the triumphalist "Markets In Everything" series at Marginal Revolution.

Market-Based Failure — A Second Opinion on U.S. Health Care Costs
Robert Kuttner's brief editorial in the New England Journal Of Medicine, pointing out the obvious reasons why single payer universal health care would cost less than the current market-based system..

FAQ: Ron Paul and his Racist Newsletter

FAQ: Ron Paul and his Racist Newsletter

Ron Lawl provides a convenient FAQ rebutting the myriad excuses made for Ron Paul's longstanding activities with racists. Part of The Ron Paul Survival Report blog.

Added to the Topical Issues category in the main index of Critiques Of Libertarianism

Thanks to corespondent LoonyRonPaul for this suggestion!

Libertarian Troll Bingo

Libertarian Troll Bingo
See which libertarian commenter scores bingo first in your favorite blog!

Thanks to James M. Jensen II for the pointer. Added to the Humor, Satire, and Quotations index.

Skepticism and Freedom will not save libertarianism

John, in comments of the previous post, write:
... skepticism is really a bedrock principle of serious libertarian scholarship. A good suggestion would be to get out of the sandbox and read Richard Epstein's "Skepticism and Freedom."

The positivist, pragmatist, consequentialist, law and economics libertarians such as Posner, Epstein, the Friedmans, etc. have a good, flexible model of economics of legal issues. But the problem is the empirical content needed to make decisions (see Epstein quote below.) As soon as you claim to know the empirical content needed, you can be doubted on Hayekian grounds. Those guys substitute their personal authority for the kind of detailed and dispersed information that Hayek attributes to the market. They might as well be setting prices based on their personal authority. Legislative solutions might not be as good as markets, but they probably aggregate information better than these individual authorities.

What I really liked in Epstein's "Skepticism and Freedom" was this bit:
When you are young in this world, you believe that the class of deductive truths about social matters is larger than it turns out to be. The great attraction of libertarian thought lay in its deductive power. The hope was that you could axiomatize the system and sort of render social problems amenable to a set of principles that yielded necessary or deductive truths. That vision certainly fired my early academic life... Essentially, as I have gotten older and maybe a little bit wiser -- which why that 30 years really start to matter -- I have discovered, to my infinite regret, that most of the serious debates over the basic principles of any political order have an irreducible empirical content.

In that one short paragraph, he invalidates most libertarian writings, including quite a lot of his own.