Externalities

My last post on Social Planning did not address the issue of externalities as well as I would have liked so I decided to write some more on it.
For the first part of the arguement, consider the example of a lighthouse from George Reisman’s book Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (pdf version available here. Note: I have not [...]

Social planning

In a response to a forwarded post, a friend made the following argument (I am putting only its essence and in my own words, since I have not taken permission to make it public)
Market forces can produce outcomes that are worse off for everyone in the system. A social planner can, (in some cases at least) improve on [...]

Economics in one unlearnt lesson

I recently found the time to read Henry Hazlitt’s book “Economics in One Lesson” (available online here). The book conclusively demonstrates that any attempts to coerce the free market can only result in the short term gains of special interest groups at the expense of everyone else and that even these short term gains are more than [...]

A new blog on business, economics and free enterprise

Simply Capitalism (feed) is a new blog on business, economics and free enterprise.
Here is an excerpt from their first post
Today, we live in a mixed economy made up of both semi-free markets and government controls. We live in a culture that views business and businessmen as a necessary evil. While the ability of capitalism to bring general [...]

Political systems and success

In a comment on my previous post “History is not the case against collectivism”, Mark asked
I also just realized, that a system/ideal can be judged from a moral standpoint separately from a history: then is it possible for an ideology that is inferior from a moral standpoint to actually succeed in history?
The question is important enough [...]

Poverty

What is poverty? What are its causes? Is it a personal problem or a social problem or a political problem? Whose responsibility is it? What actions are needed to eradicate it?
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines poverty as
1 a: the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions b: [...]

Book Review: The Future of Freedom

Summary
Fareed Zakaria’s book “The Future of Freedom – Illiberal Democracy at Home & Abroad” is a critique of democracy. Zakaria notes that democracy is not the same thing as constitutional liberty. He notes that democracy is a process of selecting governments whereas constitutional liberalism is about selecting government’s goals and refers to the Western tradition [...]

Specialization – Applied Philosophy – 3

In an essay titled “Why Nerds are Unpopular?”, Paul Graham writes that life in elementary school is warped and savage because it is isolated from reality and identifies specialization as the reason for the isolation.
“Teenage kids used to have a more active role in society. In pre-industrial times, they were all apprentices of one sort or [...]