Matt McCaffrey Explains the Economics Legacy of Edwin Chadwick
In a book review from today’s Mises Daily, Matt McCaffrey writes:
A Pioneer of Economic Analysis in Victorian England
Chadwick believed in incentive-based social reform. He also wrote about moral hazard problems, anticipating many insights of contemporary economics.
Private Security = Less Crime, Lower Cost
KHOU reports that a Houston subdivision has hired private security to replace government police. The result? Half the crime for half the cost.
Private Security: Policing at Half the Cost
KHOU reports that a Houston subdivision has hired private security to replace government police. The result? Half the crime for half the cost.
And while it’s not reported, incidents where the police shoot unarmed neighborhood residents this have also likely been cut to zero.
Bylund reviews Gilder’s ‘Information Theory of Capitalism’
Writing in Barron’s, Associated Scholar Per Bylund reviews George Gilder’s The Information Theory of Capitalism and How It Is Revolutionizing Our World.
Parts of Knowledge and Power are well argued. Gilder’s treatment of John Maynard Keynes and his disciple Paul Krugman is quite accurate, although it may seem intemperate and blunt. Considering Krugman’s unsubstantiated rants on the New York Times blog, one might even say that he earned it.
The State is more Dangerous than Anarchy
Most people fear that without government (as we now know it), social and economic conditions would be horrible, with rampant crime, including theft, extortion, robbery, rape, and murder; chronic fighting among warlords and organized criminal gangs; and low rates of saving and investment, hence little or no economic growth, owing to people’s inability to form reliable expectations about the future, even for the intermediate term, in an atmosphere of great threats to private property rights.
Economies are Not Destroyed in a Day
Most economists and policy analysts seem to have a superficial reading of economic variables.
Mises’s Ideas Desperately Needed
Kurt Schuler at Free Banking has a nice post, Mises-Grinder Combo, where he highlights Walter Grinder’s remembrance of Mises: A nice read about brief interaction of two leaders of the liberty movement.
After mentioning a recent email from Walter, who just turned 75 Kurt writes
Walter modestly did not mention a
New In the Store: Frank Fetter’s ‘Economic Principles’
Now available in the store as an ebook: Frank Fetter’s book Economic Principles. Frank A. Fetter was a leading American follower of Carl Menger and the early Austrians. He was the first economist to develop a complete statement of the pure time preference theory of interest, and he revolutionized the theory of rent which had been developed by David Ricardo and the classical economists and was still accepted by economists 100 years later.
Slow Recovery: Regime Uncertainty Is the Problem
If you haven’t seen it yet, Robert Higgs is at his best again on Regime Uncertainty and how Keynesian-based product and income accounts distort measures of economic performance in ways that clearly overstate the role of government in contributing to economic activity and masks the destructive aspects of what government does.
Highlights:
Problems with narrower “policy uncertainty” which can be interpreted as having demand side- Keynesian application:
These commentators suppose that such policy uncertainty harms the reco
