Enjoyed this essay as well as the time it was written, circa 2017 – when a libertarian flavoured ideology seemed possible
Devotion to free markets is a sin??? Nah!!!. Like quantitative induction and philosophical deduction, economics has always had a political purpose, and the purpose has usually been libertarian. Economists are freedom nuts, which is to say that they look with suspicion on lawyerly plans to solve problems with new state compulsions and longer jail sentences. Economics at its philosophical birth, among physiocrats in Paris and moral philosophers in Edinburgh, was in favor of free markets and was suspicious of overblown states. Mostly it still is. Let things be, laissez faire, has been the economists’ cry against intervention. Let the trades begin.
True, not all economists are free traders. The non-free traders, often European and disproportionately French, point out that you can make other assumptions about how trade works, A’, and get other conclusions, C’, not so favorable to laissez faire. The free-trade theorem, which sounds so grand, is actually pretty…
View original post 708 more words
Calculus of Decay 