The best approach is to let people find their own solutions. Most of their ideas will fail; some will be spectacular failures, but as long as no one’s solution is forced on everyone else, people can keep trying different things. The more ideas that get tried, the more problems will be solved.
Tag: poverty
The Universal Basic Income: Newly Contentious
The main reason why classical liberals smile upon the UBI, I fear, is its elegant simplicity. If we adopt one straightforward poverty program, we can rid ourselves of all the rest. Unfortunately, as my presentation explains, the UBI’s cost is exorbitant, the side effects are awful, and the moral justification is ultimately flimsy.
Why is Immigration a “Contentious Issue in Classical Liberalism”?
“Contentious Issues in Classical Liberalism” was the theme of this year’s Mont Pelerin Society. This gave me a chance to explore a major puzzle: Sociologically, immigration clearly deserves to be on the agenda. After all, many people otherwise sympathetic to human freedom and free markets support even more immigration restrictions than we already have. Intellectually, however, it’s hard to see why.
Keeping Score
Remember when POTUS took credit for the commercial airline safety record? POTUS is an instinctive storyteller. The process is called controlling the narrative. It consists of cherry picking the factoids, and to a lesser degree, the facts — or re-arranging the frame.
War for Poverty
When a country is mired in poverty, violent revolution is the most emotionally appealing remedy. So cinematic. Since the powers that be almost never agree, any call for violent revolution is, in practice, a call for civil war. But how well does the “remedy” of civil war actually work?
Statism = Nihilism = Statism
I’m a personal pessimist, but a long-term optimist. My own life may never be what I wish, but in the long term– maybe longer than several human lifespans– I think things will keep getting better. I am sad when I think how much horror and tyranny will probably have to pass between now and then.
Governing Least: A Litany of Insight
“The reason France does not require aid is not because some external group took pity on the French, but that they were able to generate exponential economic growth themselves. This makes it puzzling that philosophers write long books about aid without mentioning economic growth, and generally seem to imply that the path to escaping poverty lies through individual altruism. Why ignore the only mechanism that has ever succeeded in lifting millions of people out of poverty when thinking about poverty?”
Reviewing Paranoia
Hysteria and paranoia aside, what’s wrong with the book? Salam engages in extreme reverse engineering, where even the most favorable facts about immigration somehow become extra reasons to oppose it.
Death is Not the Ultimate Sacrifice
At the moment she faced the decision of death or defacement, she heard the voice of God tell her step on the face of the crucified Christ. She, a devoted Christian, was asked by God there, in front of everyone, to disrespect the cross. She was asked to make the ultimate sacrifice.
Reflections on the Balan-Caplan Poverty Debate
I really enjoyed my Tuesday debate on “The Philosophy of Poverty?” with my friend David Balan. Many thanks to GMU’s Economics Society for setting it up. While we had a great discussion, here are a few thoughts I’d like to add.