When Bob Nozick entered grad school at Princeton from Columbia in 1959, he was, politically speaking, a run of the mill social democrat. In the same year, another New Yorker, Bruce Goldberg, entered the same Princeton program in philosophy, from the City College of New York. Bob and Bruce had much in common, except that, at that point, Goldberg was an enthusiastic, proselytizing libertarian.
The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
W.W. Norton, 2023; 356 pp.
The law that establishes California’s minimum wage rate at twenty dollars per hour is purportedly aimed at uplifting the state’s working poor. The role of economics is to evaluate such claims through economic theory and empirical evidence.
Ensuring private property rights was essential for the development of the capitalist economy in the Western world. To any of the libertarians such rights are sacred, however, not to governments. Governments consistently attempted to seize property by enforcing taxes and regulations preventing full order of such. This century is not without exceptions. The Lithuanian state is attempting to control the Lithuanian real estate market by imposing a universal real estate tax.
The price of copper has hit an all-time high. This represents a signal about the world economy. The euphemism on Wall Street for the implications of the price of copper is called Doctor Copper.
If the price of copper is moving higher, then Doctor Copper is diagnosing economic growth, or possibly an artificial economic boom. If the price of copper is moving lower, then Doctor Copper will diagnose an economic contraction, or economic bust, or even an economic crisis, brought on by the previous artificial economic boom.
