Steve Horwitz's The Calling

The Calling: How Cronyism Worsens Income Inequality (and Freed Markets Reduce It)

by Steven Horwitz October 30, 2014

I recently gave an introductory Public Choice talk sponsored by Students for Liberty at the University of Ottawa. The next speaker was my friend Anne Rathbone Bradley, who was Skyping in from Washington. Anne gave a terrific talk about cronyism and rent-seeking that nicely complemented many of the points I’d made. But one of the side issues she raised ...

The Calling: Libertarians, Victim Blaming, and Structural Racism

by Steven Horwitz August 28, 2014

The events in Ferguson, Missouri have opened up yet another national conversation on race. This time, however, something is different. The images of a mostly white police department dressed in military outfits using military weaponry and vehicles while attempting to control a largely black crowd protesting the killing of an unarmed black man by a white police officer has ...

The Calling: Some Thoughts on Inequality

by Steven Horwitz March 27, 2014

Perhaps no other issue is so much in the forefront of political debate these days as inequality. Many commentators argue that one of the most damaging things happening in the United States is increasing inequality. Often this argument is tied to criticisms of markets, as if somehow free markets, or capitalism, are the cause of this supposed increase. It’s that ...

The Calling: Why I Defend Walmart

by Steven Horwitz December 5, 2013

In the aftermath of Black Friday (or now Thursday, I guess), much will be written about Walmart.  It remains the favorite whipping boy of many on the left, not to mention their enablers in what Deirdre McCloskey calls “the Clerisy,” or what Hayek called “the second-hand dealers in ideas.”  More broadly, even those without strong left-leaning opinions often have ...

The Calling: Are Libertarians Individualists?

by Steven Horwitz September 27, 2013

A young libertarian recently told me that, as an individualist, he thinks it strange that people identify with a religious or ethnic group as “part of their roots or culture.” For this young man, individualism apparently means rejecting all sorts of possible (voluntary) connections to others that might suggest that group identity is equal to, or even more important ...

The Calling: Bumper-Sticker Political Economy

by Steven Horwitz August 8, 2013

If you live in a college town, it’s almost a certainty that you’ve seen a bumper sticker along these lines: “Live simply so that others may simply live.” That phrase has the advantage of sounding like it’s based on some underlying economic theory as well as expressing a kind of moral superiority because of its concern for the least ...

The Calling: Public and Private Risk

by Steven Horwitz July 18, 2013

There’s nothing like a good Facebook debate to provide fodder for explaining core ideas in political economy. I recently expressed concern about the risks of a proposal in Oregon to allow students to pay for their education at state schools by having their postgraduation wages garnished by 3 percent for 24 years. In response, a friend asked ...

The Calling: Markets Turn Waste into Want-Satisfaction

by Steven Horwitz June 20, 2013

A frequent criticism of markets is that private owners have every incentive to dump the waste byproducts of their production processes into the air, water, or land without concern about the harmful effects. More sophisticated critics understand the idea of negative externalities and love to jump up and down about how they demonstrate the need for government intervention. There ...

The Calling: The Problem with Political Heroes and Villains

by Steven Horwitz May 9, 2013

It’s sometimes hard to tell the coverage of politics from the coverage of sports. People seem to root for political parties as though they were sports teams, cheering Team Red or Team Blue on to victory with the same passion they bring to the Super Bowl. Individual team members are followed with the same intensity as are star players ...

The Calling: In Defense of Complex, Global, Fast Living

by Steven Horwitz May 2, 2013

In the wealthy Western world, many of the products we buy come from the far reaches of the earth, made by people we don’t know, with inputs about which we are ignorant. The increased number and variety of consumer products give us a range of choices that would boggle the minds of earlier generations. And technology enables us to ...

The Calling: Back to the Future of Freedom

by Steven Horwitz March 28, 2013

As an economist, I am always more than happy to talk about how great the market is and to undertake the task of educating people on how markets work and why they are good. Certainly, one of the central concerns of the modern libertarian movement has been to extol the virtues of the market, especially the freed market. But ...

The Calling: The Challenge of Undesigned and Anonymous Order

by Steven Horwitz March 14, 2013

The spontaneous order of the market has long been an object of both theoretical and aesthetic contemplation for libertarians. From Adam Smith’s discussion of the number of hands it took to make a wool coat, to Leonard Read’s justly famous “I, Pencil,” to the examples that fill Russ Roberts’s parable novel The Price of Everything, libertarians have ...