‘Steven Horwitz’ Archives
Diversity, Ends, and Rules
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz In a previous column, I wrote about how the market promotes diversity by allowing us to use our different comparative advantages to benefit ourselves. I also noted how trade promotes the ends of those who are concerned about diversity by facilitating our contact with a wider array of [...]
A Feature, Not a Bug
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz In a recent appearance on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s Freedom Watch (Fox Business), Ralph Nader talked optimistically about a possible alliance between libertarians and Progressives. The groups, he pointed out, oppose many of the same things, from the new TSA procedures, to the wars in Iraq [...]
New Year’s Resolutions for Politicians
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz This week’s “The Calling” is coauthored with Jennifer Dirmeyer, assistant professor of economics at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. One of the most popular customs at the beginning of each new year is to reflect on the people we are and make resolutions we hope will turn us into [...]
War Would End the Recession?
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz In his September 28 New York Times blog post, Paul Krugman announced that “economics is not a morality play.” That turn of phrase is his way of defending the idea that in unusual times, such as the sort of deep recession we are in, we can get strange relationships between economic cause [...]
What “Undercover Boss” Could Be
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz Recently I stumbled across the TV show Undercover Boss. A CEO poses as a new employee at one of his firm’s factories or stores in order to see how the company really runs. In the episode I watched, the CEO of the Johnny Rocket’s restaurant chain spent time working in a couple of [...]
Consumerism Is Keynesianism
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz One of the most pernicious and widespread economic fallacies is the belief that consumption is the key to a healthy economy. We hear this idea all the time in the popular press and casual conversation, particularly during economic downturns. People say things like, “Well, if folks would [...]
To the Opponents of Fractional Reserve Banking
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz In some free-market circles fractional reserve banking (FRB) is blamed for everything from business cycles to bad breath. Defenders are seen as apologists for inflation and fraud. Thankfully these views remain a minority because they are gravely mistaken. As I, and other Austrian [...]
Plenty to Be Thankful For
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorite holidays. I love football. I love to eat, and family means a great deal to me. I also like it because I think it’s important to step back from time to time and take stock of how things are going in our lives — to note, as I have argued [...]
Where the Bourgeois Virtues Are Found
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz Economic historian Deirdre McCloskey has just published the second volume of her multivolume look at the history of capitalism and its relationship to the “bourgeois virtues.” What she means by the latter are the basic virtues of the middle class, from prudence to love to justice. What [...]
Gridlock and Regime Uncertainty
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz For those of us who want to see the role of the State reduced in the bedroom, the boardroom, and the war room, election day always brings mixed feelings. However, the one outcome that sometimes cheers us up happened this week: one party in control of the presidency and the other in control [...]
The Irrelevance of Private-Sector Experience
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz In a recent interview Carl Paladino, the highly entertaining but otherwise scary Republican candidate for governor of New York, was asked about his plans to make state government more efficient. Having lived in New York for over 20 years, I can certainly attest to the inefficiencies of the [...]
Of Football Helmets and Bailouts
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz One of the great things about economics is that so many ideas that are central to our discipline are easily seen in both the most mundane and most exotic of places. Today’s illustration of economic principles comes to us from the National Football League. One of this week’s lead stories [...]
Don’t Personalize the Political
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz A rhetorical trap that many people, including libertarians, fall into is blaming individuals for problems that are ultimately attributable to the political-economic structure. You see this when people (though usually not libertarians) say that things will be much better if we “clean house” [...]
Have Pro-Deregulation Economists Been Bought?
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz In this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education, Charles Ferguson offers up the latest version of the argument that the financial crisis was caused (at least in part or perhaps significantly) by deregulation — and claims that deregulation was pushed by economists who were on the consulting [...]
The Newspeak of Paul Krugman
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz In his September 28 New York Times blog post, Paul Krugman announced that “economics is not a morality play.” That turn of phrase is his way of defending the idea that in unusual times, such as the sort of deep recession we are in, we can get strange relationships between economic [...]
Can A Nation Be Built?
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz In the wake of both the collapse of the Soviet empire and the U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have seen a lively debate on the topic of nation-building. In particular, many people who are ordinarily skeptical about the benevolent power of the U.S. government at home have come [...]
The Complexity of Simple Economics
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz Last weekend I was fortunate enough to attend a ceremony honoring the 1986 Nobel Prize winner in economics, and my former professor, James Buchanan for his lifetime contributions to our understanding of the spontaneous order of the market and politics. The award was given by the Fund for the [...]
Mr. Keynes’s Aggregates: Concealing the Mechanisms of Change
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz One of F. A. Hayek’s most accurate, and oft-repeated, lines about John Maynard Keynes comes from a review of Keynes’s 1930 book, A Treatise on Money. Hayek wrote: “Mr. Keynes’ aggregates conceal the most fundamental mechanisms of change.” That Austrian macroeconomics rests firmly [...]
Why Do Futurists Get So Much Wrong?
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz The Austrian economist Ludwig Lachmann once walked into the colloquium room at New York University, where the blackboard displayed this quotation: “When it comes to the future, one word says it all: You never know. – Y. Berra.” Having built much of his economics on the unknowability of [...]
The Importance of History
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz Back in the classroom after a year-long sabbatical, I’m realizing how much I missed the direct interaction with students. For me, nothing compares to those moments when the light of understanding comes on in my students or when they face a challenge to things long taken for granted. Their [...]
Saving Jobs Means Saving Us From Prosperity
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz One of the most pernicious fallacies in popular economic discussions is that we should adopt policies designed to save jobs. What was once just language used by those with a special interest in particular jobs (such as unions calling for import quotas as foreign cars became more popular) is now [...]
Why Optimism Seems so Irrational — Steven Horwitz
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz Over the last several weeks my columns have made a variety of arguments about why the world is a much better place than it used to be and why we should be optimistic about the future. In last week’s column I mentioned Matt Ridley’s new book, The Rational Optimist, which I heartily [...]
Greece: The Canary In the U.S. Coal Mine? — Steven Horwitz
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman,Steven Horwitz With everything that was going on in the U.S. economy this past winter, the beginnings of the crisis facing the Greek economy were certainly easy to miss. As that crisis has now come to full flower, American observers overlook it at their peril: Greece’s problems, and those of other European [...]
Seeing the Big Picture Is Child’s Play — Steven Horwitz
When I was younger I thought airplanes were the coolest thing ever. In that way only kids (especially boys) can, I learned everything about the major commercial jets in the early 80s and was particularly fascinated by airline schedules and the hub-and-spoke system developing around that time. Most of that fascination was vicarious, since I [...]
What a World We Live In — Steven Horwitz
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz The last two years have, for the most part, not been good for those who care about free markets and human prosperity. The financial crisis and recession have led to a major increase in the size and scope of government intervention in the economy, and many people have seen their [...]
Competition and the Limits of Sports Analogies — Steven Horwitz
by Steven Horwitz The problem with markets for many critics is that competition puts people at odds with one another. If only we could have an economic system based on cooperation. Wouldn’t that be better for everyone? Instead of winners and losers, all would gain by working together. Beneath such complaints lies a view of competition [...]
