Popular views about the Protestant Reformation are absurdly sugarcoated. It’s tempting for libertarians to jump on this sugarcoating bandwagon and praise the Reformation as a triumph of religious freedom.
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.
Lessons of the South Asian Swastika
When he was living in Burma, graphic novelist Guy Delisle noticed quite a few swastikas. Indeed, much of south Asia is full of swastikas. It’s not because they’re Nazi sympathizers. The swastika was a south Asian symbol until the Nazis ripped them off. Now imagine you’re visiting south Asia and see a group of natives strolling around in swastikas. How should you react – and what should you do? There are two main routes.
The Value of the Reformation: Reply to Somin
My friend Ilya Somin has written a detailed critique of my doubts about the Protestant Reformation. Here’s my reply.
Hard Questions About the Protestant Reformation
It’s tempting for libertarians to celebrate this time in history as a great victory for freedom of speech and freedom of religion, but the Reformation’s main fruit was over a century of horrifying warfare.
Econ as Anatomy
We shouldn’t let the genuine triumphs of the experimental method overshadow the rest of the field. And we should staunchly resist anyone who uses methodological dogmas to veto well-established truths – or selectively pretend they don’t exist.
Students for Liberty Open Borders Debate: My Opening Statement
The only principled libertarian objection to open borders is that the citizens of each country are its rightful owners, so they’re entitled to regulate migration as they see fit. But if you believe this, there is no principled libertarian objection to any act of government.
Resentment Not Hate
Full-blown “hate” is a rare motive. But that hardly means that political actors are well-intentioned. The emotional spectrum is wide. And the emotion I routinely see in politics is not hatred, but its milder cousin: resentment.
Milgram’s “Obedience to Authority” Replicates
It’s an odd situation: one of the most famous psychological experiments – an experiment that changed the way people think about human nature – effectively prevented itself from ever being doubly-checked.
Human Smuggling: What If Philanthropists Were in Charge?
Suppose smugglers were pure philanthropists who only wanted to help people reach Europe alive. There’s a clear trade-off between the two goals – the safest routes will also be the most patrolled. So you have to wonder: If philanthropists ran the human smuggling industry, how much lower could fatality rates even fall?
What’s Wrong with the Thrive/Survive Theory of Left and Right
Many people in my circles now seem to take Thrive/Survive Theory as the default position; if it’s not true, it’s still the story to beat. But to be blunt, I find essentially no value in it. It’s not always wrong, but it’s about as right as you’d expect from chance.