An essay by Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains that for Robinson Crusoe, an isolated castaway, “the question concerning rules of orderly human conduct,” of social cooperation, “simply not arise,” but when “Friday, arrives on the island,” Crusoe, for the first time, must interact with others, either competing or cooperating for scarce resources.

In a recent article, Charles Hugh Smith claims that the landfill economy has put our society in crisis. Here’s how he describes the “landfill economy”:

For more than a century, the process of political centralization and state building in the United States has entailed convincing a large portion of the population that the federal government must be the final arbiter of the moral righteousness of every law and policy adopted in every state. The idea began as a novel concept in the nineteenth century when federal policy makers began to use it as a tool of asserting federal control over states. If federal institutions regard a state policy as conforming to federal notions of “rights,” then the policy is allowed to stand.

The GDP (gross domestic product) statistic portrays a view that the key driving factor of economic growth is not the production of wealth but rather its consumption. Instead, it is a calculation of the value of final goods and services produced during a particular time interval, usually a quarter or a year. Since consumer outlays are the largest part of the overall demand, it is held by many commentators that consumer spending is the key driver of economic growth.

Sweden’s rent control is widely touted by many who don’t understand economics as a model for how a property market should work. Young people in Ireland, for example, like to point to Sweden as a nirvana where rent control ensures easy availability of affordable and high-quality rental stock. 

Michael Munger, a political scientist and economist who teaches at Duke University, argues in his excellent essay “Libertarianism and Public Choice,” included in The Routledge Companion to Libertarianism, that public choice offers a more persuasive defense of free-market libertarianism than natural rights. In this week’s article, I’m going to look at some of his arguments.