Here's another cool Hayek quote, from chapter 5 of his New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas , entitled "The Atavism of Social Justice": "...there can be no distributive justice where no one distributes. Justice has meaning only as a rule of human...
Update at the bottom of the post Here's an interesting quote from Hayek's essay, "The Results of Human Action but not of Human Design," from his book, Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics : "...the natural law concept against which modern jurisprudence reacted was the...
[Cross-posted on the parent blog ] So I've been addressing the issue of anthropogenic climate change for some time now, and I haven't said much in the way of addressing specific policy proposals. But I was just given a delightful present by one of my fellow FEE associates: a copy of the American...
[Cross-posted on the parent blog ] When confronted by the possibility of climate change, many libertarians default to the position that the free market, with its ability to mobilize the ingenuity of the economy for the satisfaction of the desires of the people, will provide the solutions we desire. I...
[Cross-posted on the parent blog ] I want to discuss an asymmetry between positive and negative externalities which I think might be important when thinking about how to use the enforcement of justice to determine which actions should be permitted. Sometimes, we let individuals impose costs on others...
[Cross-posted on the parent blog ] I've been talking a lot about whether or not we could have obligations to future people, and it occurred to me that I should say something about what it would mean for us to have those obligations, if we did have them. For example, let's say (as I discussed...
[Cross-posted on the parent blog ] So earlier I wrote about the role played by discounting in doing cost-benefit analyses on the impacts of climate change. I concluded that discounting of future damage is unethical because it treats future people as if their interests matter less than present people's...
[Cross-posted on the parent blog ] In my last post , I discussed the idea of discounting as it relates to cost-benefit analysis. I reached the conclusion that discounting treats future people's interests as if they were less significant than our own, and that if cost-benefit analysis aims to make...
[Cross-posted on the parent blog ] I wrote a paper last semester on the notion of discounting future damage (I'll explain what this means below), and I wanted to revisit the issue now that I've done a little more research, to see if I still agree with what I wrote then. Basically, my paper examined...