[What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets • By Michael J. Sandel • Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012 • 244 pages]
 

Michael Sandel, a popular government professor at Harvard, asks a good question, but his answer leaves a great deal to be desired. Are there things, he wants to know, that should not be bought and sold on the free market?

[Testimony before US House Committee on Financial Services Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology Subcommittee, May 8, 2012]
 

At a hearing (going on NOW) of the House Financial Services Committee on the Federal Reserve, Ron Paul is dealing with Lacy Clay who in the past called Austrian Economics “unscientific” because it was deductive, a Keynesian Democratic congressman (Keith Ellison) who wants the Fed to inflate more to focus on the “employment” side of the dual mandate, a Friedmanite Republican congressman (Kevin Brady) who wants a “single mandate” of “price stability” (posing, of course, as a free market a

[Free Market Fairness By John Tomasi • Princeton University Press, 2012 • Xxvii + 348 pages]

Many left-libertarians have wanted to redefine “capitalism” negatively for a while: basically to mean “corporatism.” Now self-styled bleeding heart libertarians want to redefine “social justice” positively: basically to mean “concern for the poor.”

It is nice to see Frédéric Bastiat cited in the Telegraph, and the “seen/unseen” point to be spreading more widely.  But Tim Worstall couldn’t be more wrong in saying that Bastiat was “the only Frenchman who ever really understood economics.”