1. I turned my recent “Libertarianism Against the Welfare State: A Refresher” into a talk for the Cato Institute’s spring interns. Here are the slides.
2. In honor Tax Day, here’s my op-ed of “Tax Day Reflections,” rejected by the Wall Street Journal back in 1994 when I was still a Ph.D student at Princeton.
Apr 15 2016
Adam Smith argues that political leaders rely on decorum to shape their rhetorical appeals, and that voters look for the fit between speech and character to gauge moral trustworthiness. In other words, the audience of a politician is attracted to appearance of sincerity in the politician's character. Insincerity of cha...
Apr 15 2016
I often do posts defending the Efficient Markets Hypothesis. Sometimes it's just fun to debate these ideas. But there are also serious real world costs to ignorance of the EMH. Government pension funds have wasted large amounts of public money, and worsened inequality in America, by paying hedge fund billionaires to...
Apr 15 2016
1. I turned my recent "Libertarianism Against the Welfare State: A Refresher" into a talk for the Cato Institute's spring interns. Here are the slides. 2. In honor Tax Day, here's my op-ed of "Tax Day Reflections," rejected by the Wall Street Journal back in 1994 when I was still a Ph.D student at Princeton...
READER COMMENTS
David R. Henderson
Apr 15 2016 at 9:44am
Excellent materials, Bryan.
Jon Murphy
Apr 15 2016 at 10:35am
While I agree with your general thesis, I’m not sure I fully buy your argument in regards to economic public goods. I know it’s an op-ed and you don’t have a ton of room for exposition, so I was wondering if you could point me in the direction of some research or writings that could help me better understand your argument.
Nicholas Weininger
Apr 15 2016 at 12:01pm
If you have speaker notes for the “Responses Considered” slide, they would make an interesting post. I think you’ve correctly identified most of the strongest and worth-responding-to arguments for the welfare state, but there are a few exceptions:
— to the “never/can’t know it’s their fault” item, I would add one more variant: that it’s undesirable for the state to be making determinations about fault for poverty, even if those determinations are usually correct; it’s a power easily and often abused and requires discretionary judgments that in general government officials shouldn’t get to make.
— you also should address the Georgist/Pigouvian argument that people are owed some compensation for the negative externalities others inflict on them, e.g. by claiming landed property and polluting common resources.
— finally, you should address the historical-injustice/reparations argument, that e.g. African-Americans are owed some level of welfare support due to the horrendous history of state repression against them (speaking of causes of poverty that are not people’s fault).
None of these do much to justify the sort of welfare state that currently exist, but they go some way to justifying the very different, but still nontrivial and expensive, welfare state that I think the BHL/Niskanen people would favor.
Brian Holtz
Apr 15 2016 at 3:23pm
The correct answer is geoliberarianism.
Fund a basic citizen’s dividend through fees for polluting, congesting, depleting, or monopolizing the natural commons (i.e. land, water, air, wildlife, minerals, spectrum, orbits, etc.).
To not do this is in fact unlibertarian, as it leaves entire categories of aggression unpunished.
A Country Farmer
Apr 17 2016 at 12:41am
slide 6: “no fault of there own” … should be their
AS
Apr 19 2016 at 1:49am
Bryan Caplan: Your identification of “monitoring government as public good” is groundbreaking. If public goods are underprovided; government is bad. If public goods are sufficiently provided; government is unnecessary. Is there any literature with a more formal proof of this?
Brian Holtz: How do you solve the public choice problem of implementing a geopibertarian policy optimally?
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