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Be back to blogging soon. Hope these tide you over.

Speaking of tides, co-editor Fred Foldvary on regulations and swimming pools.

NAFTA has reduced income inequality in Mexico. Just think of what could be created if we continued to liberalize our relations with our neighbors (especially our labor markets).

Hypocrisy in the Democratic Party. See if you can spot it!

The myth of socialist Sweden. Libertarians have been saying this for years, and yet…

May Day: The Conspiracy of Silence Around the Romance of Evil. A nice debunking of the persistent lure of Communism.

Farewell Lecture (Congratulations!)

Brandon Christensen Economics, Liberty, Links , ,

Hey everybody,

Co-editor Fred Foldvary is retiring from Santa Clara University and will be giving a farewell lecture on June 6th. The details:

Dear CSI personae,

Fred Foldvary, CSI Director, will retire from SCU on June 2012.

 

His farewell CSI public lecture will be held

on June 6, 7-8:30 PM, Lucas Hall 126 the Forbes Family Conference Center.

 

Foldvary’s lecture will be on the question:

“What gives you the right to exist?”

If you had to prove it on the penalty of death,

how would you answer?

 

See you there,

Fred Foldvary

ffoldvary@scu.edu

We hope everybody who is in the Silicon Valley at the allotted time can attend. Here is CSI’s website. Here is a partial list of Dr. Foldvary’s academic publications over the years (hopefully they are ungated). Here are his writings in the Freeman. Here are his writings in the Progess Report.

Congratulations Dr. Foldvary, you finished the rat race in one piece!

Jacques Delacroix, 9/11, and Ron Paul the Truther

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , ,

Hey all,

I am in the midst of midterms, but I thought I’d direct you to our blogger’s most recent charges against Congressman Ron Paul: he is a “truther”!

I don’t have much to say on the topic, because Delacroix has been known to exaggerate when it comes to Ron Paul, but I thought I’d give his views a shake.  If any of our readers are “truthers”, by the way, you should probably get your head checked.  If you think have a good case for an inside job, though, be sure to lay it out here on this humble blog.  We like controversy and discussion!

Around the Web

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Co-editor Fred Foldvary on the Buffet Misrule.

Mona Eltahaway, an Egyptian-American columnist who was detained and sexually assaulted by Egyptian security forces during the uprisings, writes about Why They Hate Us.

In the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf explains how student debt forgiveness is just another subsidy to the rich.

Will Wilkinson, writing in the Economist, on how Fair is Fair.

Guess who else got their hands on Libyan weapons?

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Economics, Links , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Co-editor Fred Foldvary is participating in a symposium over at Bleeding Heart Libertarians.  Check him out.

Michael Mungowitz bags on Greece and the Euro Zone.

Zach Gochenour has a complimentary follow-up piece on Dr. Foldvary’s essay: Progress or Poverty: The Economics of Land and Discovery.

All Hail Azawad.  A blogger obsessed with maps from the New York Times writes about the new state’s prospects .  I have written about Azawad here, here, here, and here (oh God I hope I don’t sound like Walter Block!).

Jacques Delacroix provides even more insights into the French elections and its implications for the Euro Zone.

The collapse of the Euro Zone is kind of a big deal.  Personally, I hope the collapse only destroys the currency of the zone, and not the ability of its members to trade and work freely anywhere throughout the zone.  I also want a pony and never-ending supply of really good weed.

The European policymakers and technocrats should not have been so brash as to believe that they could unify Europe politically.  Not only is that bad for democracy, but it has also given the underlying principle behind the EU – free trade – a very bad name.  Repeat after me: large polities that are economically united and politically divided are good for everybody, but large polities that are economically and politically united are bad for everybody.

It’s even worse when you throw in concepts like Old World identities such as ethnicity into the mix and try to get everybody to play nice through the democratic process.

Around the Web

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At Last, Some Bright Spots in Indian Country (if you can’t view it, just copy and past the title and Google it).

The enduring failure of democracy promotion abroad.

Borderlines. A blog about maps.

Chicago, Vienna and San Francisco

Brandon Christensen Economics, Links , , , , , , ,

Co-editor Fred Foldvary has a great essay up on three schools of economic thought that deserves to be read by all.  An excerpt:

The Vienna school emphasizes the dynamics of the economy, while the Chicago method is to apply self-interest and economizing in an equilibrium analysis.  The San Francisco school uses both equilibrium and dynamics.  The dynamic approach of change over time is used to show the advance of rent and lowering of wages as the margin of production moves to less productive land and as land speculation moves the margin out even further.  Equilibrium shows that since market rent is based on the fixed supply of land and the demand to rent space, the tax on land not affecting the rent.

The San Francisco school agrees with the Vienna school that the spontaneous order of the free market best allocates goods to human desires.  But the San Francisco school points out that if the ground rent is not tapped for public revenue, when taxes on other things finance civic works, then there is in effect a subsidy to land owners, which distorts the market.

The San Francisco school has a theory of the business cycle based on land values, which rise during a boom, when speculation carries land prices so high that investment gets choked off, resulting in a recession.  But San Francisco has lacked a consensus on the role of central banking and money.

Check out the rest here.

I tend to pay attention whenever Dr. Foldvary writes, because he is the guy who wrote a book in 2007 accurately predicting the economic collapse of 2008.  You can access the book for free here.

A Few Good Debates

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I have often thought that debating other people is just as good (if not better) for learning about other how other people think (and imagine things) as reading a book on a subject.  In this spirit, I thought it’d be cool to point out some of the great debates I’ve had a pleasure of being a part of either though participation or simply as an observer.

Cato Unbound is by far the best place to go if you want to get a good, scholarly, but still colloquial, debate on a topic.  This month’s lead essay is on ‘Bleeding Heart Libertarianism’ and features responses from a number of prominent academics.  I highly recommend taking some time to read through the whole symposium.

Over at the blog Coordination Problem, economist Steve Horwitz takes a grad student (Daniel Kuehn) out for a beating in the proverbial woodshed in the ‘comments’ section.

Again in the ‘comments’ section, I take Jacques Delacroix to school on matters of foreign policy and the law.

And at MarginalRevolution, co-bloggers Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok go at it on banking institutions.  Here is Part 1 (by TC), Part 2 (AT), Part 3 (TC), and Part 4 (AT).

All of these are tough reads with lots of top scholars debating big ideas (save for me, though Jacques is a world-renowned scholar on international trade and development), so you might want to come back to this post and click around a little bit at a time.  All of the debates are highly, highly recommended.

Oh, and the Mises Institute has their new blog up and running (it’s very good): The Circle Bastiat

Native American Sovereignty

Brandon Christensen Liberty, Links , , , , , , , , , ,

I have been a proponent of abolishing, outright, the Bureau of Indian Affairs for a long time. In its place, I would either grant the Indian tribes full-fledged sovereignty with reparations for stolen property, or would grant the reservations statehood into the union of the United States federal republic.

If you’ll notice, this proposal goes hand-in-hand with my other writings on decentralizing political power in other various parts of the world, and I think that the issue of sovereignty for Native Americans goes along nicely with this theme.  Tyler Cowen recently directed me to a piece in the Economist that writes about just this topic, so I am not nearly as idealistic and young as some of you might think.

I think this decentralized process is happening for a reason, and that the reason is overwhelmingly good: the world’s markets are becoming increasingly integrated, and as a result, political power is becoming increasingly irrelevant except on a largely local or regional scale.

If we want to avoid the mistakes of the past, including slavery and horrific, large-scale wars, then we would do well to realize and affirm that decentralized governance and integrated markets are extremely beneficial to mankind. In affirming this, we would likewise do well to recognize that when people want more autonomy in governance we should grant it to them, especially in cases where post-colonial states exist. States themselves are largely illegitimate, and the post-colonial ones are the most guilty of this crime. There is no reason to pretend that we have to respect the sovereignty of post-colonial states ruled by dictators, and every reason to respect the wishes of large swathes of the people in these post-colonial states for more political autonomy. Continue reading →

Mali: Let It Collapse, Duh! Part 2

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty, Links, Politics , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I just came across an article in the New York Times via Bill Easterly, and it is very discouraging. The article is, of course, about the aspirations of Azawad, the breakaway region of Mali that just declared its independence. The article outlines the slim-to-none chances Azawad has of breaking free from the shackles of colonial legacy and African despotism:

“[…] there is little likelihood that anyone will defeat the Tuaregs on the battlefield anytime soon.

Still, they face slim odds of establishing a nation. Just ask Ahmed Abdi Habsade, a government minister in Africa’s other unrecognized state, Somaliland. ‘We have many problems,’ Mr. Habsade said in a telephone interview from Somaliland’s capital, Hargeysa. ‘The country cannot get donations from the U.N. or other governments. We are not having a budget to develop our country.’

Somaliland, which sits in the northwestern corner of Somalia, has been a de-facto independent nation for the better part of two decades, and an oasis of calm in the chaos that has swept up Somalia. Its claims to independence date from the colonial era, when it was a British protectorate while Somalia was controlled by Italy. The two states merged after independence, but the Somalilanders had almost immediate regrets, and have been trying to break free ever since.

Somaliland has had successes, including holding peaceful elections, yet it has struggled without an international stamp of Continue reading →

Links From Around the Web

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Co-editor Fred Foldvary on the destruction of the Libertarian Party.

Newest member of the consortium, Warren Gibson, writes in the Freeman about GDP.

Ninos Malek on associating in peace.

Jacques Delacroix questions Ron Paul’s credibility.

And writing over in the Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf celebrates the failed boycott attempts of Rush Limbaugh’s show.

I just started school today, so if you don’t hear from me for a while, you now know why.  Have a great spring!

Two More Days!

Brandon Christensen Economics, Liberty, Links , , ,

Two more days to sign up for the Independent Institute’s summer seminar scholarship offer.

I first became interested in libertarianism during the 2008 presidential campaign, when Ron Paul gained national prominence for his tangle with Rudy Giuliani on foreign policy.  In the summer of 2009, just after the presidential primaries wrapped up, I embarked on a nationwide journey to learn more about the concept of liberty.

My first stop was the Independent Institute’s summer seminar, an from that experience I not only learned a lot about how markets work (I just spent the afternoon going over my notes from the seminar), but I was also able to make some great connections as well.  Indeed, the co-editor of this blog, Fred Foldvary, was a lecturer at the seminar, and Brian Gothberg, who is incredibly good at teaching basic economic subjects, are just some of the fantastic people that I have been able to count over the past three years for intellectual support.

If you want to spend a week in one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s most beautiful locales, learning about liberty, history, civil society, and the market process, then I highly suggest checking out their seminar.  It is absolutely fantastic.

Some Great Links From Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Economics, Links , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A fascinating blog post on Indian domestic politics and foreign policy by a Ph.D. student living in New Delhi and studying at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Alex Warren, a journalist with extensive experience in the Middle East, writes about Libya’s decentralization.

“The Current Models Have Nothing to Say.” That is economist Robert Higgs’s analysis of modern, orthodox economics.

Might regionalism help solve Central America’s woes?  Be sure to check out the rest of the blog, by Seth Kaplan, too.

Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic has a penetrating look at the logic of a drug warrior (h/t Brian Aitken)

Co-editor Fred Foldvary, writing in the Progress Report, explains that value is subjective.  This is an important concept when it comes to understanding economics.

A Few Fun Links

Brandon Christensen Liberty, Links , , , , , , , , , ,
  1. Europeans: anti-Semitic violence is okay as long as it’s done in the name of Palestine
  2. Five reasons to withdraw from Afghanistan by Malou Innocent in the National Interest
  3. Speaking of Afghanistan, Justin Raimondo wonders if the murderer acted alone
  4. In USAToday (!!) there is a great piece on libertarianism and science. Be warned all ye religious libertarians! (ht Wilson Mixon)

Okay! Okay! Perhaps they’re not that fun, but enlightening I hope.

Some Chinese Links

Brandon Christensen Links , , , , , , ,

I apologize again for my lack of blogging activity lately.  I will be done with Finals on Thursday!

I regularly read Shanghaiist, a webzine of culture in Shanghai specifically and China generally, and I just came across this great bit of reporting on the ouster of one of the Communist Party’s most outspoken reformers, Bo Xilai.

In the piece, a list of outrages and speculation of Mr. Bo’s ouster are reprinted from Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter.  Here are a few of them: Continue reading →