Based Economics

          Whenever left-wingers, such as Kyle Kulinksi, critique the ideas of libertarians, they inevitably   bring up Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, and laissez-faire capitalism in a derivative manner. While they’ve got us on the last point, and there were certainly aspects of Milton Friedman that were libertarian, the talking point concerning Ayn Rand is mistaken not just for her lack of concern over gun control, her support of intellectual property laws, or even for her explicit hatred of libertarians. Still, at face value, one could understand having difficulty understanding how Objectivists and libertarians are different. Aside from the anarcho-capitalists, of course, we both tend to agree that a government should be strictly limited to providing courts, police, and a military for the purposes of protecting the rights to life, liberty, and property. Of course, as indicated by the non-libertarian positions held by Rand, this distinction between th...

       Reading one of the more recent editions of Thomas Sowell’s classic Basic Economics in the chapter on price controls includes an excerpt of a woman recounting what happened when rent control was enacted in Egypt in 1960. Sowell writes: “An Egyptian woman who lived through that era and wrote about it in 2006 reported: ‘The end result was that people stopped investing in apartment buildings, and a huge shortage in rentals and housing forced many Egyptians to live in horrible conditions with several f amilies sharing one small apartment. The effects of the harsh rent control is still felt today in Egypt. Mistakes like that can last for generations.’” The quote in question that Sowell provides is from Nonie Darwish’s 2006 book Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel, and the War on Terror . While the neoconservative philosophy the title of the book indicates is certainly a major turn off for libertarians, we should not throw the baby o...