Bylund on Coasean Transaction Costs

Per Bylund recently published “Signifying Williamson’s Contribution to the Transaction Cost Approach: An Agent-Based Simulation of Coasean Transaction Costs and Specialization” in the Journal of Management Studies. Bylund writes: “It is a simulation test of Coase’s transaction cost approach using agent-based modeling, and what I do is basically show that transaction costs have no explanatory power – but specialization and the division of labor does.”  

The Scottish Referendum

I’ve refrained from comments on the Scottish referendum on independence. Let people decide their own path is a reasonable stance to take, so let the Scots decide the future of Scotland.

Yet in discussion with one of my past students yesterday, the question arose “should other citizens of the United Kingdom have a say in the matter?”

The Higher Education Monopoly

When I posted noting that students were entitled to resist the ridiculously bad choices being made by administrators for commencement speeches, the response, even from Mises Institute readers, was that students who don’t fall in line and obey school administrators are “brats” who don’t appreciate the wonderful gift they are being given by tenured government employees. By extension, of course, those same [people must approce of the mandatary discussions about one’s secual identity -   http://www.thefire.org/please-report-to-your-resident-assistant-to-discus

How Inflation Helps Keep the Rich Up and the Poor Down

[A selection from Deflation and Liberty.]

The production of money in a free society is a matter of free association. Everybody from the miners to the owners of the mines, to the minters, and up to the customers who buy the minted coins — all benefit from the production of money. None of them violates the property rights of anybody else, because everybody is free to enter the mining and minting business, and nobody is obliged to buy the product.

The Levellers and Early Libertarian Thought

The first-ever libertarians were the Levellers, an English political movement active in the seventeenth century. The Levellers contributed to the elaboration of the methodological and political paradigm of individualism, and they are at the origin of the radical strand of classical liberalism. While the Levellers are often characterized as a quasi-socialist movement, the aim of my research is to restore the Levellers to their classical liberal heritage, and to find out to what extent they were in fact libertarian.

Subscribe to