Welcome to my personal web site. I've devoted much of my life to trying to eradicate coercion and secure liberty for all and I've learned that while it's a lot of work, it can be personally rewarding, too. I'm presently Vice President for International Programs and a Senior Fellow at the
Cato Institute, as well as director of Cato
University and of the Center for the Promotion of Human Rights. In addition to my work at the Cato Institute, I have served on several board of trustees and currently serve on active advisory boards of a number of other organizations. I frequently lecture in America, Europe, Eurasia, Africa, China, Brazil, and the Middle East on the history of liberty and constitutionalism,
globalization and free trade, individualism, public choice,
and the moral and legal foundations of individual rights. My curriculum vitae and a few of my published writings are available for downloading in the column below. (A couple require fast internet access; either that, or a lot of patience.) To the right are blog entries on whatever seems interesting at the time or strikes my fancy.
"Enterprise and Culture," presentation at conference at the Cato Institute on "What Should Be a Culture of Enterprise in an Age of Globalization?," March 29, 2007
"No Exit: Framing the Problem of Justice," an essay on John Rawls, the social contract, and social justice from from Ordered Anarchy: Jasay and His Surroundings, ed. by Hartmut Kliemt and Hardy Bouillon (London: Ashgate, 2008)
"Freedom Properly Understood", An Address Presented before the Liberal Thinkers’ Conference, “The Future of Freedom,” 60 Years Liberal International, Hamburg, 17 November 2007
"Saving
Rights Theory from Its Friends," from Individual
Rights Reconsidered, edited by Tibor Machan (Stanford:
Hoover Institution Press, 2001)
Reprinted from Individual Rights Reconsidered: Are
the Truths of the U.S. Dec laration of Independence
Lasting?, edited by Tibor R. Machan, with the permission
of the publisher, Hoover Institution Press. Copyright
2001 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford
Junior University.
ï“Do We Need a Government” (Comment on Papers by David Friedman, Birgir Thor Runolfsson, and Boudewijn Bouckaert, delivered
at the Mont Pelerin Society meeting, Reykjavik, August 2005)
"The
Resources of Civil Society," with Steven Scalet
and David Schmidt, Revista Argentina de Teoría
Jurídica de la Universidad Torcuato Di
Tella, Noviembre 1999
"Twenty Myths About Markets," Conference on "The Institutional Framework for Freedom in Africa," Mont Pelerin Society Meeting, Nairobi, February 26, 2007
My presentation yesterday to the European Resource Bank was fun, but I was dead tired and could barely stand toward the end. (I had been up very early to finish the Powerpoint.) I made profitable use of a book that was sent to me by a Cato Sponsor, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, which provided a bit of a theoretical framework for the concrete elements of my talk. (The book is, like most business books, a bit too wordy at times, but it’s offers some very interesting insights.)
I emphasize free market capitalism, to distinguish it from the cronyism and interventionism that has played so large a role in the current crisis: the Federal Reserve, bailouts, Government Sponsored Enterprises (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), the Community Reinvestment Act, and more. (As Don Boudreaux has pointed out, the penchant for blaming the problems on “greed” is the Great Chicago Fire on oxygen. Without it, nothing would burn, but it’s present around us whether things burn or not, so it’s better to look for the spark, which in this case is not greed, but institutions that channel it into wasteful avenues.)
I’ve been in Amman, Jordan for meetings with publishers, writers, and others involved in Arabic publishing and will travel on in the very wee hours of the morning to Istanbul, after which I’ll fly to Tbilisi for the European Resource Bank, where I’ll give a few talks and meet with lots of great people from around Europe and Eurasia, followed by a trip to Belgium, where I’ve got a few items on the agenda, including this:
(That’s 15 October at 8 pm at the University of Antwerp, on “Social Order, Law and State: Is law necessary to produce social order and is the state necessary to produce law?”)
Editor’s Note: Scholars at the Cato Institute have not supported Washington’s $700-billion financial bailout plan. The wording of a sentence in Martin Masse’s September 30 commentary, “Karl’s Comeback,” mistakenly implied otherwise. The National Post apologizes for the error.
(The Russian state authorities are also looking into cracking down on “emo boys” and their haircuts and other identifiers. Not enough small neighboring countries to invade, I guess. They do seem to need someone weak to pick on.)
(I was Editor of Dollars & Sense, the newspaper of the NTU in the 1980s, when I was studying philosophy at The Catholic University of America; it actually made a pretty good fit. NTU has always been a good friend of the taxpayers.)
Come November 6, it will be two years since an Egyptian student was imprisoned for expressing his opinions in his personal blog. It breaks the heart to think of what he is enduring, which includes physical and psychological abuse and isolation.
A variety of defenders of freedom are getting together in various cities to remind the Egyptian authorities that Kareem is not forgotten. If you can help or just want to be present, please contact the FreeKareem.org campaign. Dignified gatherings are planned for a number of cities around the world. Please take part. If you cannot do that, please write a respectful letter to the Egyptian authorities or donate to his support on the FreeKareem.org site via Paypal, as his extremist father has disowned him and his friends (who are mainly poor students) raise small amounts to pay for his food and clothing while in prison, as the Egyptian state does not do that. (I have donated in the past and am about to send more now.)
In doing some research for my paper on “Classical Liberalism, Morality, and Poverty” I re-read Thomas Babington Macaulay’s brilliant refutation of Tory paternalism, “Southey’s Colloquies on Society.” (If you want to read a definitive smackdown refutation, I recommend this as probably the best I’ve ever read.) I asked my friend Don Boudreaux for his ideas on Macaulay (I know Don’s a great Macaulay fan) and he mentioned that Walter Olson, another old friend, had written a great appreciation of Macaulay. A quick google search and there it was, a tribute both to Macaulay’s genius and to Olson’s exquisite command of the English language: “Confessions of a Macaulay Fan: The great liberal historian appreciated on his bicentenary.” Anyone interested in the work of one of the greatest historians and the greatest champions of liberty who ever lived should start with Wally’s essay. Enjoy!
The presidential debate, which I had on as I was working on a paper on “Classical Liberalism, Poverty, and Morality” for a volume in the Ethikon series, was rather depressing. But I do work best when there is meaningless white noise in the background, so it helped my writing.
I had the pleasure of hearing Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina in Charleston last Saturday address a Cato Institute meeting, where he gave an enthusiastic defense of liberty and called for more citizen involvement to combat Leviathan. He’s an inspiring champion of limited government. In today’s Washington Post, he makes an eloquent case against bailing out those who made bad decisions, letting the market liquidate malinvestments, and learning the lessons from the current financial crisis: “A Bailout for All Our Bad Decisions?”
Last week’s events were rooted in distressed mortgage securities whose optimistic values were facilitated by quasi-governmental entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The investment banking capital write-downs were turbocharged by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which did what too many laws do — it fixed yesterday’s problem. The amazing expansion of credit was fueled by a Federal Reserve offering an easy-money policy that led us right into a credit bubble. All this was made worse by the government enabling some people’s tendency to want more house than they can afford.
