Walter Block The Mishnah and Jewish Dirigisme Acrobat Distiller 2.0 for Power Macintosh

In its Kelo decision, the Supreme Court upheld Connecticut’s decision to use its eminent domain powers to take property from one set of private owners and give it to another set of private owners. The State defended this plan on the grounds that the former group of owners was using its property in a less efficient manner than would the latter. There are ominous parallels between this decision, which amounts to no more than thinly veiled theft, and the works of Ronald Coase and the “Law and Economics” movement spawned by his 1960 publication.

Volume 1, Article 17 (2009)

I. Introduction

This paper is an attempt to apply a libertarian analysis of punishment to statist and state-like activities.

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Volume 2, Article 3 (2010)

I. Introduction

For a long time, I have been writing about the importance of privatizing highways, mainly because of the carnage that occurs on our socialist roads. People die like flies on these statist vehicular thoroughfares, some 40,000 per year in the U.S. alone.

Volume 2, Article 4 (2010)

The thesis of Van Dun (2009)1 is that there is a conflict between freedom and property rights, and that libertarians ought to side with the former.

      Suppose we are on the upper part of the Laffer curve. That means that if the tax rate is lowered, greater tax revenues will accrue to the government.1 Stipulate that the state is an evil institution. This is a libertarian analysis, after all. Thus, we arrive at what must count at least, as an anomaly.

It has gotten to the point,

     I am delighted to be able to reply to Jakobsson (2010), which is a rejoinder to my publication (Block, forthcoming).1 One reason for my joy is because that author does me honor in thinking that my own article is worthy of a rejoinder. Another, is because there will be no “passing of the ships in the night” in this exchange.

Volume 2, Article 31 (2010)

Introduction

I am honored by the publication of Borer (2010). I welcome the publication of this essay, and thank this author for singling out my contributions to libertarian theory for comment. I am grateful to him, too, for this reply gives me the opportunity to delve deeper into the issues covered in Block (2009A, 2010). In the present rejoinder, I shall follow the pattern established by Hazlitt (2007) in his response to Keynes (1936): liberally quoting from Borer (2010), and then subjecting his views to criticism.