Big Business is my favorite Tyler Cowen book in a long time. In fact, I’d place it second after In Praise of Commercial Culture. May the pro-market, pro-business genre wax fat! In case you missed any of my posts on the book, here’s a full inventory:
1. Recasting the anti-hero – highlights and unfortunate omissions on construction, immigration, and labor markets.
2. Rollback – why doesn’t Tyler go much farther?
3. Triple standards – why do we judge business so much more harshly than government, organized religion, or virtually anything else?
4. The noble crony – why we should wish business had a lot more political influence than it does.
READER COMMENTS
Philo
May 7 2019 at 1:33pm
On your “simplistic” theory of the left-right distinction:
I understand why people would have anti-market feelings, though I think that those who take such feelings seriously (leftists) are wrong to do so. But your account of “rightism” leaves the rightist’s antipathy to leftists or to leftism unmotivated, given that many rightists are not very enthusiastic about the market. Fundamentalist Christians, Nazis, and other “rightists” who are not strongly pro-market must be reacting against some other aspect of leftism besides the latter’s anti-market bias; but that implies that your account of leftism is incomplete. Perhaps you might add, to your characterization of “leftists,” that they tend to be “rationalists” in Hayek’s pejorative sense (they underestimate their own ignorance), and to be objectionably self-congratulatory about their own behavior (which is mostly just verbal–just striking a pose).
Matthias Görgens
May 10 2019 at 11:50am
Wouldn’t political competition be enough of a motivation?
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