The Environment

Our friend Robert Bradley recently took a look back 25 years ago when the New York Times still had some scientific backbone.

According to Guy McPhers

Featuring Thomas DiLorenzo, Doug French, Bob Higgs, Yuri Maltsev and Bob Murphy at the Mises Circle in Indianapolis: “Agricultural Subsidies:

Many people are willing to donate much money to clean up government-owned lakes and streams and to spend many hours fundraising and complaining about pollution. But suggest to those people they should just pay market prices for access to those same bodies of water, they become indignant.

The Fed and it’s friends blamed cold weather for much of the year’s lackluster economic growth.

An expert in environmental economics, Dolan attempts to assess the Austrian contribution to this field. He finds it wanting. I must make the same assessment of Dolan. His misunderstanding of Austrian economics is only matched by his mischaracterization of free market environmentalism.

Some scholarship in the Austrian tradition today opens itself to the charge that it is textual exegesis — what did Mises really mean?

In the introduction to the proceedings of the South Royalton conference, I suggested that Austrian economics had the potential not just to survive but also to achieve what Thomas Kuhn (1962) calls a scientific revolution. Such a revolution would fundamentally change the way practitioners of a field saw the world as a new paradigm came to replace the dominant one. What can we say of the success of Austrian economics in that regard?

Re-Thinking Green: Alternatives to Environmental Bureaucracy is an excellent book of easy-reading essays dealing with environmental policy from the perspective of “free-market environmentalism” 

Perhaps the best concise summary of this book is given by editor Alexander Tabarrok in his concluding chapter. As he points out, where most urbanists see market failures,