Steve Horowitz of St. Lawrence University and HNN’s Liberty and Power Blog is joining the blogging staff of the Austrian Economists. I would say that brings the total up to 5, but it feels more like 2. In any case that’s Pete Boettke and Steve Horowitz together again.
Pete Boettke asked what you’ve been reading that you’re learning from, here are my two most recent answers. McCloskey’s reading for consumption v. reading for production distinction came to mind when I read Pete’s post.
Kirzner, Discovery and the Capitalist Process
Lavoie, National Economics Planning What is Left?
One of the running tabs on Marginal Revolution is “Markets in Everything,” where Tyler points out a real opportunity to buy or sell something you ordinarily wouldn’t think was available on the market. This is kind of the opposite of that. I’m a nerd and a creative one at that, sometimes I think about a product or a service that seems like it would be ideal and is not available and I say why the heck not? In many cases I admit the obstacles might be obvious, but wouldn’t it be great if they weren’t there? I’ll try my best to keep this a running theme, but here are a few starters.
1. Going on a road trip today so I’ll say, high speed trains / moving roads that increase your net speed in a car / cars that drive themselves. I wish there was something that makes it so when you traveled long distances at high speeds you didn’t have to pay attention; you could read or sleep or whatever.
2. Loosie Cigarettes. If you’ve lived in a less affluent area or the Carribean you know what a loosie is and how convenient they can be. Why aren’t they everywhere?
3. Also related to the road trip. Global internet access.
More to come…
Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistols says hello to Ron Paul. Awesome!
Ron Paul & The Sex Pistols on Jay Leno
This 1989 Washington Post article takes Martinson’s classic “nothing works” conclusion to task. It implys that Martinsons method was short sighted and overly stated. What seems to be the understated implication of the Post piece is that political support of rehabilitation programs does not necessarily translate into effective rehabilitations (a conclusions Martinson would most surely have agreed with). In other words, maybe Martinson meant “nothing the political apparatus can do will work to rehabilitate.” The innovative techniques of psychotherapy and community based rehabilitation program require hard budget constraints to be discovered and applied efficiently.
Though I wish Kling had mentioned Austrian-ness as an essential quality of Masonomics I was glad to read this:
Why do Masonomists blog so avidly? I think it is because there is a sense that we are onto something, and we want to ramp up the conversation among ourselves as well as communicate with a wider audience.
Very similar to the way Klein and I interpreted the prominence of blogging at GMU in our paper.
The private military firm Blackwater has been getting a lot of media attention lately, some good and some bad. In libertarian terms the case is not cut and dry. One part of my libertarian inner economist wants to say that private firms are better than the state at providing international defense services. David Friedman once similarly wrote that the incentives produced from a volunteer or paid army yield preferable quality outcomes compared to forced conscription and a military draft. On the other side of the debate there are some human rights issues to be concerned about. As Hart, Shleifer and Vishny (1997) have noted concerning the contracting out of prison services, private managers are often promoted to degrade quality by cutting costs to maximize profits. Benson (1994 and 2003) has similar concerns.
On net I think the market wins out on this debate but not necessarily the current so-called private firms we see today. Private companies should be more responsive to quality standards that take note of the excessive use of force compared to governments. The fact that current private firms appear to be liberal with their applications of violence is not necessarily due to their private-ness.
When governments use excessive force in international conflict they are only held in check by additional levels of international bureaucracies and governments, private firms on the other hand should be directly liable under their domestic tort systems. Unfortunately firms like Blackwater are receiving degrees of immunity specified in their contracts from American governments.
What seems obvious and affirming to my market-preference for international involvement is the fact that if the federal government were to revoke these immunities then Blackwater would conduct itself more prudently. Raise the cost to frivolous violence and it will be committed less frequently.
The current American legal system distinguishes between civil and criminal law. Civil law is the realm of torts and lawsuits. Charges are pressed from one person against another while criminal law is filed by the state against a criminal. As a general exercise, when I read the news I like to think what if this crime was handled as a civic offense?
Take the Jena Six case for example. The major issue behind all the media attention is racial prejudice — prejudice of the attackers, prejudice of the instigators, prejudice of the school, the courts, and the criminal justice system. Not a single participant is immune from being accused of racial prejudice. So how would this issue of racial prejudice be different if this were a civic case?
Each party’s racial prejudices would have to engage each other. The court would take second seat compared to the prosecutor’s. But the prosecutor’s would be victims of violent attack in this case. Would as many people be willing to face off against the families of victims and call them prejudiced? Would prosecutors be willing to levy cases that were prejudiced, knowing they would attract this much attention? Would courts be willing to levy rulings that seemed prejudiced knowing they could be held in alternative civic courts? It seems everyone would be much more inclined to be on their best behavior compared to the current system.