Back on March 19th, 2020, I pointed to this piece by Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas at my blog – Coordination Problem — where he states very clearly the reality constraint in public policy deliberations in the current coronavirus crisis. Without committing one way or another on the debate over the epidemiology models being used, I thought, and still think, this way of putting it could serve as a very useful point of departure for serious conversations about trade-offs, short-run/long-run, and public policy in a liberal society. By now you have seen these graphs numerous times, but they are still...
Robert Tollison and Operationalizing Public Choice
1 Introduction Anyone who knew Robert Tollison also knew his love of sports. He was a great sports fan as well as a great sports analyst. For many years, he continued to play pickup basketball with graduate students. When I was a graduate student, I played basketball regularly with Bob, and when I came back a decade later as I was deciding to move back to George Mason University, I went and played ball with Bob over at the field house. I hadn’t played full court basketball in 10 years, but that day I did—it wasn’t pretty for me as I struggled to keep up. But our team stayed on the court...
Peter Boettke
Shop Our Books
Israel Winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War
From the Foreword by Lawrence B. Wilkerson: “[T]he debate over whether oil was a principal reason for the 2003 invasion has waxed and waned, with one camp arguing that it absolutely was, while the other argues the precise opposite.” “Mr. Vogler, himself a former...
Domestic Imperialism: Nine Reasons I Left Progressivism
Imagine the Catholic Church (or any person or group of people) doing what the government does every day: Everyone who doesn’t give the Catholic Church 25% of his annual income every year will be put in jail. If he resists the Jesuit officer, the officer has the right...
Diary of a Psychosis: How Public Health Disgraced Itself During COVID Mania
FOREWORD BY JAY BHATTACHARYA, MD, PHD Diary of a Psychosis is different from all other books on Covid: it traces the development of the government response as it happened, bit by bit, and subjects it to relentless scrutiny: did any of it do any good? It thereby...