Thomas Jefferson famously said, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
Author: Bryan Caplan
Bryan Caplan is Professor of Economics at George Mason University and Senior Scholar at the Mercatus Center. He is the author of The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, named “the best political book of the year” by the New York Times, and Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think. He has published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the American Economic Review, the Economic Journal, the Journal of Law and Economics, and Intelligence, and has appeared on 20/20, FoxNews, and C-SPAN.
BLM Versus Collective Guilt
One of my students was recently part of a classroom discussion on Black Lives Matter. Another participant roughly said, “It is totally unfair for people to blame BLM protestors for rioting. The vast majority of BLM protestors were peaceful. Blaming them for a few bad apples is just collective guilt.”
My Guidelines for Government
Until now I’ve never really told the world’s governments what they ought to be doing. My bad, but I’m ready to make amends. Here, in no particular order, are my Guidelines for Government.
The Ironclad Argument Against Racism
Being labelled a “racist” is scary. If you scour the Internet, you will find a few confessed racists. For the most part, though, “racism” is a doctrine we ascribe to others in order to damn and ostracize them. The strange result: While we hear endless debates about whether a person, idea, or practice is “racist,” we rarely hear arguments against racism itself. Arguments of the form, “Racism is wrong because…”
Mises and Open Borders
The Mises Institute has been the center of libertarian immigration skepticism for the last three decades. Ludwig von Mises himself, however, was a staunch open borders advocate for people of all races. Starting over a hundred years ago. Yet in a classic case of “No good deed goes unpunished,” historian Quinn Slobodian recently interpreted
Reflections on the Ukrainian Refugees
I just returned from a two-week speaking tour of Poland, Hungary, Czechia, and Slovakia. Most of the focus was on Open Borders, which has been translated into Polish, Hungarian, and Czech. Lots of Americans urged me to cancel the visit, or at least leave my 12-year-old son behind. Since our family ignored the doom-sayers, my son and I had an inspiring and thought-provoking journey, making friends wherever we went.
Unforgivability and Collective Guilt
When people debate the character of a public figure, a standard tactic is to find a single “unforgivable” action – something so damning that there is no need to examine further evidence. I call this the Unforgivable Heuristic. And while this heuristic has its place, we greatly overuse it: The main problem with the signaling […]
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Don’t Make Me Wonder
A few of my friends are convinced that woke activists plan on establishing a woke dictatorship. Overall, I deem this is paranoid hyperbole. Every now and then, however, I read a woke activist, and I briefly wonder if my paranoid, hyperbolic friends are right.
How to Talk to People: Econ vs. Psych
Who’s right: economists or psychologists? The lazy answer is: It depends. Sometimes negativity pays; sometimes positivity pays. The thoughtful answer, though, is something like: 20% economics, 80% psychology.
How to Turn the Left Against Discrimination Laws
Regardless of political party, almost all Americans support discrimination laws. Moderates and conservatives support them out of a sense of basic fairness. Progressives support them out of fanatical zeal. Yet strangely, I suspect that one simple event could swiftly move progressives from ardent supporters of discrimination laws into ambivalence or even opposition.