Econlib

1 week ago | econlib.org | Pierre Lemieux

Welcome to a little thought experiment. Suppose that Mississippi became a sovereign country. “Sovereign” means that the state apparatus can make any decision, even one that violates international law. The flip side of sovereignty is that the state can also impose its decision on the country’s residents or a portion of them, and that other states in the world have no recognized right to intervene against that imposition.

2 weeks ago | econlib.org | Pierre Lemieux

John Stuart Mill famously wrote, about pushing principles to the extreme, that “unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case” (On Liberty). This is not obvious, for extremes often produce antinomic or non-generalizable results.

2 weeks ago | econlib.org | Pierre Lemieux

Expressing a contradiction can show plain ignorance or cognitive impairment. It can also suggest a hypothesis or theory that explains the contradiction away. Consider a current example.

3 weeks ago | econlib.org | David Henderson

Vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz, of whom I am not a fan, had one very good line that he used a lot when running on the Democratic ticket last summer: “Mind your own damn business.” He didn’t really believe it. Someone who sets up a snitch line during the Covid lockdown doesn’t really believe that government should mind its own business. But, despite Walz’s hypocrisy, it’s still a good thought.

3 weeks ago | econlib.org | Pierre Lemieux

For more than two decades, Disco Corp., a Japanese company with $25 billion in annual sales, has been trying to operate as if its 7,000 employees were independent contractors in the open market. The 87-year-old company now manufactures three-fourths of all the machines to cut, grind, and dice semiconductors. An interesting story in the Financial Times (Harry Dempsey and David Keohane, “Can You Run a Company as a Perfect Free Market?