Recently Tom Lehman lamented1 one of the frustrations free market economists often face when reading economic journalism: opposing bad policy for the wrong reasons.One of the earliest memories I have of feeling this pain was in college and reading that the first President Bush wanted a decrease in

The New York Times reports that Paul Samuelson has a paper coming out questioning the consensus of economists in favor of outsourcing.

“[The] untruth, Mr. Samuelson asserts in an article for the Journal of Economic Perspectives, is the assumption that the laws of economics dictate that the American economy will benefit in the long run from all forms of international trade, including the outsourcing abroad of call-center and software programming jobs.”

This morning’s news brings reports on the bedeviled Frank Quattrone, formerly of Credit Suisse First Boston, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison for obstructing a federal investigation. He did this, argued the feds, by sending out a routine 22-word e-mail that reminded his subordinates to clean up their e-mail files.

CNN provides a helpful summary of a study by the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, ranking states by how much they tax their citizens (NY is #50, Alabama is #3).

Max Borders, program director for the Institute for Humane Studies, writes in TCS in favor of war on Hobbesian grounds: “freedom does not drop like manna from heaven, but is earned drop-for-drop and coin-for-coin by the sacrifices of blood and treasure.” IHS was founded by F.A. Harper who wrote a sweeping defense of peace and liberty in 1951: In Search of Peace (Menlo Park, CA: IHS, 1970; reprinted in Writings of F.A. Harper, V.2, IHS, 1979, pp. 376-99).

Roger Lowenstein’s recent piece in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, Help Wanted, demonstrates a good deal of common sense. Bush claims to have “created” 2.5 million jobs, while Kerry intends to create 10 million. This is all quite ridiculous, as Lowenstein rightly observes.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is a highly significant resource for classical liberalism and libertarianism.  Not only can one rely upon Kant’s account of the foundations of morality to derive libertarian principles:  Kant’s own specifically political philosophy is written very much in a classical liberal vein that opposed paternalist government while emphasizing the centrality of the individual’s property rights.

From The Independent: