James Buchanan

Rockford, Illinois and the free society (Friedman, Tullock, Coase)

3 Comments / Economics, Politics /

Milton Friedman (Nobel Prize in Economics, 1976) received an honorary doctorate from Rockford College and was our commencement speaker in 1969. Gordon Tullock (co-founder of Public Choice economics with James Buchanan, Nobel Prize in Economics, 1986) was a native of Rockford. And I was charmed to find this bookplate in the Rockford University library’s copy […]

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Keynes-Open-College

Did Keynes Save Capitalism? (Open College podcast)

Leave a Comment / Economics /

Or was he opposed to capitalism on principle? My 32-minute podcast discussion. Available at various listening sources: YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/opencollege… Bitchute http://www.bitchute.com/opencollegepo… Apple Podcasts https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/o… SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/opencollegepod… Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/poss… Google Play https://play.google.com/music/m/Iuram… Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/2qgnmMD…

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Keynes’s continuing destructiveness — Ebeling’s and my evaluations

Leave a Comment / Economics, Politics /

Economist Richard Ebeling at FEE: “The Damage Still Done by a Defunct Economist”: “Keynes helped undermine what had been three of the essential institutional ingredients of a free-market economy: the gold standard, balanced gov­ernment budgets, and open competitive markets. In their place Keynes’s legacy has given us paper-money inflation, government deficit spending, and more politi­cal

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Nancy MacLean’s postmodern rhetorical strategy

3 Comments / Philosophy /

[Republished from The Foundation for Economic Education.] Nancy MacLean has written a postmodernist book, while her libertarian critics are writing modernist responses. The critics point out the free-wheeling, fact-free, and conspiracy-tinged narrative MacLean has constructed, and they argue that logically her account does not fit the reality of James Buchanan’s life and writings. All good

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The two Americas: 13 countries’ GDP

2 Comments / Economics, Philosophy, Politics /

I’ve started reading Guillermo M. Yeatts’s 2010 Plunder in Latin America. Yeatts lists thirteen American countries’ per capita GDP in 2008 US dollars, first alphabetically by country: Argentina 8,281 Bolivia 1,948 Brazil 8,379 Canada 46,826 Chile 10,933 Colombia 5,478 Cuba 4,840 Ecuador 3,770 Mexico 10,278 Peru 4,454 Uruguay 8,942 USA 46,647 Venezuela 4,315 I re-arranged

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Seminar: Philosophy and the Evolution of the Mixed Economy

2 Comments / History of Philosophy, Literature, Philosophy /

One of my talks at Francisco Marroquín University was on making sense of our mixed economy–an unwieldy combination of market and socialist elements. The 28-minute talk integrates themes from my intellectual heroes–Smith, Mill, Mises, Hayek, Rand, Popper, Friedman, Buchanan, and Tullock–and connects market economics, politics, ethics, history, and public choice to explaining our semi-coherent mixed

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APEE talk on the mixed economy

Leave a Comment / Economics, Education, Entrepreneurship, Ethics, Politics /

At the APEE conference next month in Las Vegas, I will be presenting “The Evolution of the Mixed Economy – A Schematic Approach.” My talk integrates themes from several major thinkers from whom I have learned a great deal: Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and Gordon Tullock.

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