From the monthly archives:

April 2005

Caesar’s Bath

April 29, 2005

OK. Here’s my long-delayed Caesar’s Bath contribution. I thought this was hard partly because all the easy stuff has been done (the bath water’s pretty dirty, by now), and partly because I like almost everything at least a little bit. But here you go.
Thomas Jefferson. The more I read about the guy, the more I [...]

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I’m as Free as a Bird Now

April 29, 2005

Over at Liberty and Power, Sheldon Richman complains about Ron Bailey’s compatibilism:
Free will does not mean actions are uncaused. It means they are caused by persons. The popular notion that persons can be reduced to mechanistic neurological processes is self-refuting—if true, its advocates are uttering not words but meaningless sounds. The “causes” of actions, Thomas [...]

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Investment and Ignorance

April 28, 2005

Don Boudreaux, as usual, is right on in this post about the riskiness of allowing ignorant citizens invest in the market.
The fact that Uncle Sam has for so long assumed primary responsibility for providing for Americans’ retirement goes a long way toward explaining much of Americans’ ignorance about investing for retirement. Americans simply [...]

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Relatively Relativistic

April 25, 2005

All this relativism talk. Velleman posts on relativism because he isn’t satisfied with what he sees. Me neither, even after reading Velleman. Allow me to ruminate.
The correct thing to say about relativism is that some version of relativism is true, and the correct thing to say about absolutism is that every version of absolutism is [...]

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Understanding the Process of Economic Change

April 21, 2005

My review [.pdf] of Douglass North’s Understanding the Process of Economic Change in the new edition of The Cato Journal is now online.

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Distributed Wealth-Enabling Conditions and Collective Entitlement

April 12, 2005

In a chapter from this book, Jerry Mashaw from Yale Law lays out a prime piece of welare statist reasoning with great lucidity, and it got me thinking.
Mashaw says that an economic system characterized by a wide division of labor and well-functioning legal and civil society institutions:
Our capacity to support ourselves depends [...]

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Blogorama

April 7, 2005

Apologies for the non-blogging. I’ve been pretty busy working on an essay on social security and my talk at BU this weekend.
FYI, there’s a Blogorama tonight @ Rendevous. I will be there.

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