What's new

Here's another 60 or so new links and indexes from the past month.

Hard to Handle [More...]

"To paraphrase a line once used about Malcolm X and the 50s and 60s era Nation Islam, Ron Paul may not like white nationalism, but white nationalism sure likes Ron Paul."[more...]

Jeet Heer critiques libertarians on race

Jonathan Blanks and Brian Beutler assembled a number of tweets from Jeet Heer on libertarian problems with race issues, starting with outright racist appeals from Ron Paul and general insensitivity among largely white libertarians. [more...]

Racists

There is a strong overlap between racists and libertarians. Because libertarianism obsesses about independence from social norms, racists are welcome, and actively courted by people like Ron Paul. No surprise that libertarians are 94% white, whiter even than the Republican party. [more...]

VC for the people [More...]

There are reasons to believe that a Basic Income program would be beneficial for growth and allow people to "take chances on more meaningful and ultimately more valuable work." [more...]

12 Alternative Principles [More...]

Thomas Sargent gave a speech with 12 supposed principles of economics. Here's an alternative set. [more...]

The contradiction in economics [More...]

Thomas Sargent's 12 lessons of economics have been criticized as "as either too simplistic, partial or just wrong". But are these really lessons or just assumptions economists make? [more...]

Bastiat's Broken Window Error [More...]

The broken window analogy fails to explain how Europe has become so much more prosperous after innumerable wars. [more...]

Patterson and Kehoe, and the great lead debate [More...]

How Robert Kehoe developed the strategy that the lead industry used to avoid regulation and liability over the course of decades of poisoning of millions. A strategy replicated for tobacco, innumerable other pollutants, and global warming denialism. [more...]

Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy [More...]

A summary of the important findings of Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page's study. "In English: the wealthy few move policy, while the average American has little power." [more...]

Who Are the Koch Brothers and What Do They Want? [More...]

Senator Bernie Sanders explains "how successful David Koch and like-minded billionaires have been in moving the Republican Party to the extreme right" over the past 34 years. "Our great nation must not be hijacked by right-wing billionaires like the Koch brothers." [more...]

Karl Polanyi Explains It All [More...]

Robert Kuttner explains how Polanyi's The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time is more relevant now than ever. "Contrary to libertarian economists from Adam Smith to Hayek, Polanyi argued, there was nothing “natural” about the free market." [more...]

Frederic Bastiat as a Modern Liberal [More...]

"Frederic Bastiat is a liberal in the modern sense–concerned with positive as much as negative liberty, as eager to use government to boost people’s power to accomplish their purposes (when it can effectively do so) as to preserve individuals’ freedom of action from pointless regulatory meddling." [more...]

Frederic Bastiat

Libertarians like Bastiat because he criticized some government practices as foolish or thievery. However, he consider taxation for many government services justified, work programs in times of crisis, infrastructure, etc. He was a modern liberal. [more...]

Classical Liberalism and Classical Liberals [More...]

A large list of classical liberals displaying the huge diversity of their views, including many pro-grovernment or anti-capitalist liberals such as American founders, Rousseau, Kant, Bentham, etc. Libertarians like to misrepresent them with only a list of conservative economists. [more...]

Buchanan clubs [More...]

Starts with a brief, easy overview of Club Goods versus Public Goods. Club goods are non-rivalrous (until congestion occurs) like public goods, but excludable. Much ofgovernment can be characterized as producing public goods and club goods. [more...]

Letting the Free Market Bare Its Teeth [More...]

"If a pro-white political philosophy is to gain traction in a world that now finds it abhorrent, it cannot overtly present itself. Pro-white advocates will have better luck adopting mainstream ideologies that include advantages for whites." Such as libertarianism. [more...]

2013 American Values Survey: In Search of Libertarians in America [More...]

Americans are about equally libertarian and communalist, about 7% each. Quite different than the Nolan Chart would leave you to believe. And surprise! Most are young, while males who favor legalizing marijuana, but oppose same-sex marriage. [more...]

The Noble Task of Revisionism [More...]

Murray Rothbard proclaims the necessity of libertarian revisionist history, because all other history is the "lies and deception of the State and its Court Intellectuals". He wants us to switch to HIS propaganda. [more...]

The Nozickian case for Rawls’ difference principle [More...]

"There is a very strong Nozickian case to be made for Rawls’ difference principle. Because the reality of scarcity causes the use of resources to necessarily infringe upon the liberty of others, it makes sense to say (as Nozick does) that you should only be able to undertake such use if it does not worsen the position of others." [more...]

Salvaging Non-Aggression for Egalitarianism [More...]

"[...] we can say that we should only impose such institutions [property] if we do so in a way that essentially strikes a fair deal with those whose negative liberty we are destroying. This is, essentially, what Robert Nozick has in mind when he says that you can blow up people’s negative liberty so long as you do not worsen their welfare." [more...]

The Social and Moral Philosophy of the Minimum Wage [More...]

Brad DeLong points out that maximizing real income per capita is a choice that does not escape the problem of interpersonal value comparisons, and thus cannot pretend to be dispassionately utilitarian. [more...]

Three Expensive Milliseconds [More...]

The finance industry is hugely wasteful, perhaps wasting 2 percent of GDP. Side effects also include suckering small investors, increasing inequality and destabilizing markets.[more...]

In Defense of Egalitarianism [More...]

"One of the common ways in which this plays out is when someone says that egalitarianism makes no sense because it is obvious that people have different levels of intelligence, different physical attributes, different abilities and specializations, and so on. In other words, egalitarians are characterized as proposing that everyone is inherently equal in such a literal sense. But, to my knowledge, no one actually claims this, and hence it is a gigantic straw man. " [more...]

Egalitarian

A libertarian dog-whistle term, usually referring to strawman positions such as redistributing organs and not admitting that people have different abilities. [more...]

Government Creates Rights

All rights are created by violent enforcement, and modern government is where we choose to sequester legitimate force. Government creates property: without government, there are temporary holdings, but not property in the modern sense. [more...]

Chomsky.info: The Noam Chomsky Website [More...]

Simply the most complete online source available. Articles, audio, video, interviews, talks, debates, letters, articles about Chomsky and more. Well worth searching. [more...]

The short guide to Capital in the 21st Century [More...]

Matthew Yglesias provides a short, clear summary of an extremely important book. He explains both the arguments and their relevance. A must read. [more...]

Koch's Anger Translator

Charles Koch wrote a ludicrous screed in the Wall Street Journal, a stand on dignity to excuse decades of plutocratic meddling in politics. A pseudonymous commenter "Mr." served as Anger Translator at Noahpinion. [more...]

Boycott Koch [More...]

A large activist page opposed to the multifarious political activities of the Koch brothers. Has a connected blog. [more...]

No violence but personal violence [More...]

"When I use the word violence in the context of discussing theories of property, I mean a specific thing by it: acting upon the bodies of others without their consent. This is as neutral a definition of “violence” as you will find. It is the definition of violence implied by the concept of self-ownership. It is the definition of violence implied by the concept of negative liberty, which is defined as freedom from external restraint." [more...]

Private charity can't replace government social programs [More...]

To suggest that community or faith-based charities can effectively supplant government social programs is a fantasy that serves only as a talking point to cut those programs.[more...]

Study Confirms Tea Party Was Created by Big Tobacco and Pollutocrat Kochs [More...]

"A new academic study confirms that front groups with longstanding ties to the tobacco industry and the billionaire Koch brothers planned the formation of the Tea Party movement more than a decade before it exploded onto the U.S. political scene. Far from a genuine grassroots uprising, this astroturf effort was curated by wealthy industrialists years in advance." [more...]

Conservative Donors Pump $1 Billion A Year Into Climate Denying Groups, Study Finds [More...]

"Organizations that actively block efforts to address climate change are funded by a large network of conservative donors to the tune of nearly $1 billion a year [...]" Describes new "dark money" techniques for concealing funding sources, especially from the petrochemical industry. [more...]

What is Wrong with Neoclassical Economics? [More...]

"The list is a long one and includes practically every major theory [...]" At least 16 important assumptions that are often false. [more...]

Review: Jacob Hacker -- The Great Risk Shift [More...]

"First, he looks at the various ways in which risk has increased over the last few decades... But what isn’t hard to trace back are the decisions made by policy makers to exacerbate these risks by aiding and abetting the transfer of risks to individuals rather than countering it. This is the second prong of Hacker’s argument." [more...]

Did Austrians Never Predict Hyperinflation?

Mark Faber, Peter Schiff, Doug French and Gary North have all predicted hyperinflation since the Great Recession. "The idea that Austrians never predicted hyperinflation in any sense is outrageous, mendacious and contemptible rewriting of history." [more...]

You vs. John [More...]

Take some "nobody is the boss of me" libertarian propaganda and add some real circumstances, and suddenly it shows just how stupid the propaganda really is. [more...]

Cartoons

A picture can be worth a thousand words. Or 100,000 from Ayn Rand. [more...]

A Regulated Kidney Market Designed To Minimize Social Harms

Libertarians endorse unregulated organ markets, but that would bring many social harms. Single buyer markets where the payments go to the donor's choice of charity might solve most of the problems. [more...]

How The Justice System Is Rigged Against These Cheerleaders Suing The Raiders For Wage Theft [More...]

A private attempt to create a kangaroo court that can ignore labor law. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan says (of another case): “The monopolist gets to use its monopoly power to insist on a contract effectively depriving its victims of all legal recourse." [more...]

Arbitration

Libertarians promote privatization of justice through arbitration. Supposedly it is more economical, but it is obviously biased towards employers who require workers to give up rights to take disagreements to court. [more...]

Violence Vouchers: A Descriptive Account of Property [More...]

When a state upholds a system of property, all it is doing is issuing to owners a set of vouchers for violence against those who ignore property. Trade is similarly based on property and violence. Rents also are based on violence, ruling out just deserts and just processes arguments. [more...]

Progressive Taxes

Suggested by Adam Smith, first implemented in the USA: reduces inequality and supported by economic theory. [more...]

Taxation Is Slavery

Libertarians have all sorts of badly stretched analogies they frequently repeat as propaganda. Taxation is not slavery any more than rent or other contracts are slavery. [more...]

Little House On The Prairie

Proto-libertarian author Rose Wilder Lane commits one of the basic hypocrisies of libertarianism. She declares "we never took anything from government" while conveniently forgetting the free land obtained from government dispossession of native Americans. [more...]

A Book That Needed To Be Written [More...]

An excellent, short review or "What Every Economics Student Needs to Know and Doesn’t Get in the Usual Principles Text". [more...]

Economic Realism (Wonkish) [More...]

A discussion of how realistic economic models should be, and for what purpose. Includes a good criticism of Milton Friedman. [more...]

America’s Taxation Tradition [More...]

Taxation to prevent an undemocratic distribution of wealth is an American, progressive-era invention which had enormous support. [more...]

Piketty's Inequality Story In Six Charts [More...]

"[P]artly by using new sources of data, such as individual tax records, and partly by expanding the research to other countries, Piketty and his colleagues have deployed their charts to reshape the entire inequality debate." [more...]

What Every Economics Student Needs to Know and Doesn't Get in the Usual Principles Text

John Komlos shows how misleading it can be to mechanically apply the perfect competition model in an oligopolistic environment where only an insignificant share of economic activity takes place in perfectly competitive conditions. [more...]

Democracy, What Is It Good For? [More...]

Libertarians often disparage democracy as harmful to growth, based on old research. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson explain why the old research was wrong. "In all, the evidence seems to be fairly clear that democracy is good for economic growth." [more...]

The Case for a Progressive Tax: From Basic Research to Policy Recommendations [More...]

Peter Diamond and Emmanuel Saez explain progressive taxes with optimal tax theory They recommend high marginal tax rates, earnings subsidies to encourage low-income workers and taxation of capital income. They explain why other low-tax policy ideas are not relevant. [more...]

Little Libertarians on the prairie [More...]

Rose Wilder Lane rewrote her mothers memoirs to make libertarian American fables. "Comparing Wilder’s original memoirs to the contents of the published books, it’s possible to see a pattern of strategic omissions and additions." [more...]

Growth Versus Distribution: Hunger Games [More...]

"[...] we don’t actually know much about how to produce rapid economic growth -- conservatives may think they know (low taxes and all that), but there is no evidence to back up their certainty. And on the other hand, we know how to make a big difference to income distribution, especially how to reduce extreme poverty." [more...]

Taxes And Growth

Low taxes do not produce more growth, though democracy does. Successful reduction of poverty by tax-funded programs does not reduce growth either. [more...]

Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men: A History of the American Civil War

Revisionist libertarian historian Jeffrey Hummel shows that Abraham Lincoln is the Great Statist Satan who transformed the US into a statist hellhole. How does that work withlibertarian claims that the late 19th century US was closest to libertarian? [more...]

A Case Study In Wingnut Welfare: Think Freely Media [More...]

"Created by individuals associated with the Franklin Center and fueled with right wing billionaire cash, Think Freely Media is a wingnut welfare organization. The “dark money ATM” behind the tea party movement created TFM to provide cushy positions and deals that are completely divorced from those “free market principles” that the tea party movement constantly espouses." [more...]

Wingnut Welfare

Plutocratic funders funnel vast amounts of money for political purposes through myriads of shell companies. They evade campaign finance regulation and mislead the IRS about the purpose to get unjustified charitable tax deductions and conceal the origin of the money. [more...]

Political Libertarianism

Political libertarianism is the most important libertarianism because we are continually exposed to it through the media. It is a mass market astroturf libertarianism. It has been aplutocratically-funded effort since the 1930's and has been wildly successful in concentrating wealth since the 1980s. It is about redistributing society's wealth to the rich and calling that just and moral. [more...]