Author: Jason Kuznicki

At Cato Unbound this month, we’re talking about the Austrian school of economics. In his lead essay, Professor Steven Horwitz talks about how Austrians approach empirical questions, arguing that Austrians are indeed doing important...

As you may have heard, Brink Lindsey is returning to the Cato Institute. Don’t ask: I don’t have inside information. The Koch brothers—or zombie Ayn Rand, or Yaron Brook, or whatever malefic presence pulls...

It’s important to read and think about views other than your own, especially if the disagreements are profound: Many of our young people want to be ”wives and husbands” rather than simply ”partners” and...

Winning a two-candidate election in which voters can be plotted on a spectrum will require winning the median voter. This is a well-known result in political science. We usually think of the median voter...

My colleague Julian Sanchez has a fascinating article in Wired today about warrantless wiretapping: As Congress prepares to reauthorize the controversial FISA Amendments Act of 2008 — which effectively legalized the notorious warrantless wiretap...

Note: This post is part of our League Symposium on Democracy. You can read the introductory post for the Symposium here. To see a list of all posts in the Symposium so far, click...

Throughout August, I’m guestblogging at Radley Balko’s site, The Agitator. Radley is among the most effective libertarian advocates around, and I’m honored to stand in while he writes a much-needed book. My first post...

Unlike monkeys, humans are capable of deserving things for morally significant reasons. These reasons go far beyond simple Pavlovian conditioning or the whims of a capricious experimenter. Humans form complex plans of all different...

The more I read of Arizona School libertarianism, the more I like it. From David Schmidtz’s Elements of Justice, p 19: Think of instruction manuals you have used while assembling a new piece of...

Tim Kowal’s post prompted some wide-ranging thoughts about what the government is entitled to. Here they are.

I know that it’s silly season, so whenever I say anything remotely campaign related, it means I’m Objectively Pro (Whoever). Never mind that I’m strongly opposed to both of the major-party candidates. Never mind...

BobbyC asks me some questions about ethics and political theory. I answer below the fold.

…over at Slow Tuesday Night. I look forward to everyone else’s.

After finishing Ubik, I realized that I’d been reading Philip K. Dick in the wrong order. Ubik is foundational. It belongs at the start, not near the end, of one’s reading of the author....

Rose writes: “My ethical leanings are reasonably anti-consequentialist. That is, I don’t think what makes shoplifting a soda right or wrong is a matter of the unhappiness it causes.”

Did anyone else read Ubik? Anyone else planning to post? If so I’ve got some thoughts I’ll write up over the weekend. But I’m concerned it would just be me talking to myself.

I’ve said several times that I understand the motivation for the individual mandate tax: It aims to solve an adverse selection problem in health insurance. If we didn’t have it, more healthy people would...

More about taxes, penalties, and how to tell them apart. From the majority opinion by Chief Justice Roberts: [I]n Drexel Furniture, we focused on three practical characteristics of the so-called tax on employing child...

…when I read this. We do a lot of (a) and (b) here, I think. Which is great.

Can we all just admit that it’s a silly bit of legal chicanery to say, “We aren’t commanding this action. We are taxing the failure to perform it”? You can also spare me the...