Most non-economists and all Marxist economists, bless ‘em, believe in the “labor theory of value.” You do, probably. Bless you also.

My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.

mccloskey.substack.com/p/the-labor-th…

.Deirdre Nansen McCloskey’s remarks on the role of liberalism were excellent. She, like David Boaz, is an inspiration. She also teased a new manuscript on liberalism and public religion, so I now have something new to watch for and eagerly anticipate.

The state is big and getting bigger.  It requires papers, proofs of property or citizenship, by the ton. That gives rise to the problem of what the Greek-American economist Elena Panaritis calls “informality.”

My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.

mccloskey.substack.com/p/informality

English speakers are confused about the idea of “liberty.” I hope you in Brazil are not.

My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.

Also on my Substack: mccloskey.substack.com/p/whats-liberty

I recently spoke at LibertyCon International LibertyCon discussing the significant role freedom plays in fostering innovation and prosperity.

For those interested, the talk is now available online.
youtu.be/J_R1P67mKBs?t=…

Universal Basic Income?

The word “universal” is only one of UBI’s problems.  It’s wholly impractical to give much to literally everyone.

My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.

Also on my Substack: open.substack.com/pub/mccloskey/…

A true er liberalism, then, should promise in the race of life only an equality of permission. 

Wherever you start the race you may, as the sporting British put it, “have a go.”

My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.

Also on my Substack: mccloskey.substack.com/p/constitution…

Review of Simon Johnson and Daron Acemoglu’s latest book, “Power and Progress”, by the inimitable Deirdre Nansen McCloskey.

She asks, “What’s wrong with their case for a new Leviathan, so long as it is advised by certain economists from MIT?

archive.is/qi9Bc

A nation doesn’t know what it wants, because it’s not an “it.'

Brazil, viewed as a free society and not an anthill, is 214 million individual people, with billions of plans for today, for life.

My column for Folha de S.Paulo.

Also on my Substack: mccloskey.substack.com

Why do most people of good will—and those of evil will, too, but for different reasons—dismiss liberalism?

My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.

An editor for Clarín in Buenos Aires asked me to tell why I described Javier Milei, the libertarian candidate in Argentina, as not a “fully adult liberal.”

Yet I wish Argentinians would vote for him on 19 November, against the smooth but corrupt and Peronist statist.

Peronism must stop. I pray that Milei can get Argentinians to grow up. But I worry that Milei may not be the grownup to do it.

My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.

'Yet the conviction has grown up over the past century that the state should take responsibility for solving every “problem,” because it has the orders to solve it.'

My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.

'Economics should be a worldly philosophy, looking on the economy from a height—with among other telescopes those supply and demand curves.'

My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.

'It is beautiful, and true, that much of our life, such as the Portuguese language and our patterns of love and friendship, and much of our economic life, is the outcome of spontaneous order, like the spontaneous order of a forest.'

My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.

'But it was not this French, rational side of the new ideas that mattered most. It was the new, Scottish, liberty side.'

My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.

'The way we actually get better off is not by shuffling jobs around, or letting the geniuses in Washington or Brasilia decide what the great new industries should be, but by thinking up better ways to do things.'

My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.

'[Hirschman] was an advocate of what some of us now call “humanomics,” an economics that uses all the resources of our culture, from numbers to words, from life to art.'

My latest column for Folha de S.Paulo.

Time for a quiz.

Who benefits monetarily from better local schools?
A new restriction on house building?
A denial of planning permission to change agricultural land on the edge of Cambridge, England to residential uses?

Answer: the owners of existing land in the city center.

'Uh oh. 

The claim of “externality” justifies state power in everything. 1984.  China.'

Read my latest column for Folha de S.Paulo here 👇