David R. Henderson is a research fellow with the Hoover Institution and was a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California who taught courses on energy economics. He originally endorsed the standard view among economists that if some physical scientists are right that greenhouse gas emissions will lead to substantial warming, and if the government must “do something,” then the best policy response is a tax on carbon.

In the classic video game Sim City, players acting as the mayor of a simulated city begin by allocating space by industrial, residential, and commercial zones. There is no option in the game to have overlapping districts, where a department store might sit next to a middle-class home. The very idea would seem absurd to modern minds, which typically accept city zoning as an intuitive and unquestionable element of city governance. But prior to the twentieth century, zoning did not exist in the United States.

We are repeatedly told that the unprecedented monetary stimulus by the Federal Reserve and other central banks is necessary to stimulate the economy, create jobs, and generate economic growth. The truth is that this scheme is designed to stealthily steal from the productive classes in order to enrich the unproductive financial class and the counterproductive political classes. It is a con game.

[A selection from “Restitution in Theory and Practice“ in Volume 12, Number 1 (1996) of the Journal of Libertarian Studies.]

If one reads the headlines you might think that since the yield curve has inverted, the economy is in a recession, Trump will be swept from office and then the Progressives’ goals are right around the corner.  Not so fast!  While much of that may still happen, we are not there yet.

A very common criticism of the libertarian position runs as follows: Of course we do not like violence, and libertarians perform a useful service in stressing its dangers. But you are very simpliste because you ignore the other significant forms of coercion exercised in society—private coercive power, apart from the violence wielded by the State or the criminal. The government should stand ready to employ its coercion to check or offset this private coercion.

[From Power and Market.]

[Adapted from “Landlordism and Liberty: Aristocratic Misrule And the Anti-Corn-Law League“ by Richard F. Spall in the Journal of Libertarian Studies.]

Rape, violence, and drugs are ubiquitous in prisons, so it is not surprising that recidivists commit a hugely disproportionate share of crime. Government prisons and so-called private prisons have no incentive to rehabilitate prisoners or improve prison conditions because taxes are their source of revenue, which is guaranteed regardless of performance.