Steve Horwitz's The Calling

The Calling: I Have Seen the Future of Freedom

by Steven Horwitz February 21, 2013

Even before I started writing regularly for The Future of Freedom Foundation, I had thought a lot about the future of freedom and how those of us who care deeply about liberty in all its dimensions are going to bring about the world we want to see. For the over 30 years I’ve been involved in the libertarian movement, ...

The Calling: The Everyday Marvels of the Market

by Steven Horwitz February 14, 2013

Those of us who live in largely market-based economies can too easily take for granted what we might call the everyday marvels of the market. We find ourselves with things that would have amazed and mystified people just a couple of generations ago. If we think of the marvels the market delivers, we normally think of technology, but fancy ...

The Calling: “Who Gets What” Is Only Half the Problem

by Steven Horwitz February 7, 2013

When we economists talk about the role of prices in a market economy, one of the points we often make is that prices determine who, among the many who would like to have a particular good, are actually able to obtain it. In other words, we must decide “who gets what.” In a world of scarcity, the wants of human ...

The Calling: The Importance of Assuming Self-Interested Politicians

by Steven Horwitz January 17, 2013

With the death last week of Nobel laureate economist James Buchanan, the freedom movement has lost one of its most important thinkers. Unfortunately, Buchanan’s work often gets boiled down to the seemingly trivial observation that politicians are self-interested. Put that way, it’s too easy for people to respond, “Everyone knows that!” Although it’s true that the assumption of self-interested politicians ...

The Calling: Why “Rent-Seeking”?

by Steven Horwitz January 3, 2013

Public Choice theory, especially in the hands of James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, has given libertarians a very effective set of arguments against government intervention. In the face of cries of “market failure,” when real-world imperfect markets quite understandably fall short of the unrealistic model of perfect competition that mainstream economists use to portray free markets, the Public ...

The Calling: Risk, Tradeoffs, and Freedom

by Steven Horwitz December 20, 2012

In the wake of the Newtown massacre, people from all over the political spectrum are chiming in with their own recommendations of what should be done to prevent this kind of horrific tragedy. For my purposes here, I want to put aside two rather obvious points in order to explore some more subtle ones. First, for American politicians, especially President ...

The Calling: The Private and the Public

by Steven Horwitz December 6, 2012

I am thrilled that I am able to bring “The Calling” to a new home here at The Future of Freedom Foundation, and equally happy to have my friend Sheldon Richman once again as its editor. For this first column in its new home, I want to look at another example of one of my favorite concerns for modern ...