I’ve not been on this site for quite a while, but should get back to updating it. (Most of my online interaction, besides email, has been on Facebook, which has its advantages, but is limited.)

An excerpt from my talk to the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh, North Carolina. (Full presentation is available through the preceding link.)

Featuring Kim Chung Ho of the Korean Center for Free Enterprise:

The first short introduction of the speaker, Gurcharan Das from India, is in Arabic, but the rest is in English, with Arabic translation. Gurcharan Das is the former CEO of Procter and Gamble India, chairman of the libertarian Centre for Civil Society, and author of the outstanding books India Unbound and The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma. Dr. Nouh El Harmouzi (who introduces him and translates) is director and editor of Minbaralhurriyya.org and author of the just released book Le sous-développement dans le monde arabo-musulman: Quel est le rôle des institutions informelles?

The Herat Literary Association

Children's Water Park in Herat, Afghanistan

Packing Biscuits (for Americans: cookies) in a bakery in Herat, Afghanistan

The remains of a Soviet tank (the turret is half off, the barrel stuck in the dirt)

(Having difficulty uploading more photos…will try….here’s one, though! I also find the software very buggy…and I can’t understand why some photos upload twice!)

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The Drive from Kabul to the Panjshir Valley

Along the Road to the Panjshir

Wrecked Soviet Military Armor

More to come….the internet in my guest house is very slow….

Where we had breakfast along the Panjshir River

A caged bird at the restaurant.

Another wrecked Soviet tank.

The great lawyer/economist Ronald Coase is cruising into his 101st year. His 100th birthday was a few days ago (December 30, 2010) and he is still at work teaching economics, helping us to understand the world, and spreading gentlemanly good behavior and the spirit of liberty. Recently a number of my Chinese friends took part in a conference in Shanghai (organized by the Fudan University department of economics, which is chaired by the distinguished economist Prof. Li Weisen).

Coase is among the founding parents of “law and economics” and a truly great thinker and scholar. (I had the privilege of meeting him and enjoying his insights at a conference I organized years ago in Aix-en-Provence, where we talked about “intellectual property rights”; the papers presented were published in the Summer 1990 journal of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, including my own paper, “Are Patents and Copyrights Morally Justified? The Philosophy of Property Rights and Ideal Objects,” available here. His comments were insightful and during meals I learned a lot about the history of economic thought, including that his teacher was Arnold Plant, whose teacher was Edwin Canaan, and back in a line of teachers and students to Adam Smith.)

Coase’s essay on “The Nature of the Firm” revolutionized the understanding of institutions by focusing attention on transaction costs in structuring organizations. (It’s nicely summarized by Bob McTeer here: “Ronald Coase: The Nature of the Firm and their Costs.”) In 1960 (23 years later!), he revolutionized economics again with his essay on “The Problem of Social Cost,” which is nothing short of brilliant and has changed completely how serious social scientists consider human interaction. (Terry Anderson of the Property and Environment Research Center sheds some insight on the nature of social cost in “Coase’s 100th Birthday: No More ‘Externalities,’” [hat tip to Don Boudreaux for the link].)

There’s so much sheer ignorance floating around about Coase’s views on the role of property rights in “internalizing ‘externalities’” (sorry, Terry, but I did put “externalities” in double quotation marks), that it’s well worth reading Coase. He doesn’t say what some crackpots say he says, but he does help us to understand institutions, notably property. A short and very clear explanation can be found here.

A nice complement to this one on which I worked with friends:

I’m off to Las Vegas for meetings, for FreedomFest, where I’ll debate on the question of “Anarchy vs. Limited Government” and sign copies of Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice for Laissez Faire Books (which has the lowest price, in case you haven’t bought a copy!), and then head off to Japan, Philippines, China (for meetings and a conference on “Austrian economics” in China), San Diego (for Cato University!), Athens, and Crete. Maybe I’ll see you along the way!

Johan Norberg on Book TV (from his Cato appearance)

Johan Norberg at Cato (full video of forum)

The Liberty Camp at Issyk Kul, Kyrgyzstan, is going great! The enthusiasm of the Kyrgyz libertarians is infectious.

Some scenes from the central district of Bishkek, where people are enjoying the spring weather (except for just now, as it has just become blustery!)

Just a little note to anyone with whom I might be sharing a meal: I’ve mulled over the issue of the right treatment of animals for some time and have been “sympathetic” to ethical vegetarianism (I’m insufficiently informed to have any strong opinion on the nutritional issues involved). I finally decided that being “sympathetic” to an ethical claim of this magnitude is not enough, when the point is that, if true, it should change one’s behavior, and so I’ve decided that I’m not eating meat anymore. (I know that many of those animals would never have been bred, and therefore would never have lived, were it not for meat-eating humans, but the same argument could be used to justify cannibalizing humans who might not exist — individually, not as a species — without factory-farming and if the argument doesn’t convince there, it doesn’t work with pigs or goats, either. I also recognize degrees of mistreatment, so free-range meat is less objectionable than factory-confined meat, shrimp are on the borderline, and oysters, which lack a central nervous system, seem acceptable to me. Nor do I think that animals have “rights” like humans do; I just think that we have obligations not to mistreat them. A very interesting, often moving, somewhat rambling, but insightful treatment is found in Matthew Scully’s Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy.)

My point here is not to debate anyone, but just to note that meat is off my diet. (I ought to note that I was influenced by the example of a colleague whom I admire who has avoided eating meat or otherwise promoting the killing of animals for some time for ethical reasons, despite sometimes having, as he acknowledged to me, a strong appetite for meat. If he can suppress his appetite in order to do the right thing, I can, too.)

Hat Tip: Nathalie Vogel

My colleagues at Minbaralhurriyya.org (The Forum of Liberty, one of the Lamp of Liberty projects) have announced the schedules for the 2010 Freedom Schools:

July 18 – 24, 2010 in Marrakech City, Morocco
September 26 – October 1, 2010 in Beirut, Lebanon

Registration is available online.*

*Note: all sessions will be held in Arabic.

A lot of exciting work is coming out from the team led by Dr. Nouh El Harmouzi. In 2010 they will bring out a series of new books, including the just published Islam and Modernism, introduced by Dr. Muhammed H. Abdul Wahab:

Many more books are scheduled for publication this year. Each one represents a huge investment of time, energy, and love by the Minbaralhurriyya.org team.

(Click on the Octopus….)

Come and learn from leading public choice economists, political and economic historians, leading lawyers and advocates for liberty, at Cato University.

THE FACULTY

* Robert Levy, Chairman of the Board, Cato Institute; co-author of The Dirty Dozen: How Twelve Supreme Court Cases Radically Expanded Government and Eroded Freedom
* Tom G. Palmer, Senior Fellow, Cato Institute; director of Cato University; vice president for international programs, Atlas Economic Research Foundation; general director of the Atlas Global Initiative for Free Trade, Peace, and Prosperity; author of Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice
* Diogo Costa, Editor of the Portuguese/Brazilian libertarian project OrdemLivre.org
* Robert Higgs, Adjunct Scholar, Cato Institute; senior fellow in political economy at the Independent Institute; editor of the Independent Review, author of Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government and other books
* Prof. Robert McDonald, Assistant Professor of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point, noted Jefferson scholar and author, Thomas Jefferson’s Military Academy: Founding West Point
* Prof. Charlotte Twight, Adjunct Scholar, Cato Institute; professor of economics, Boise State University; author of Dependent on D.C.: The Rise of Federal Control over the Lives of Ordinary Americans
* Daniel Griswold, Director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies, Cato Institute; author of Mad about Trade: Why Main Street America Should Embrace Globalization
* David Boaz Executive Vice President, Cato Institute; author of The Politics of Freedom: Taking on the Left, the Right, and Threats to Our Liberties and Libertarianism: A Primer; editor of The Libertarian Reader

(Put the octopus into your own blog to spread the word; see the bottom of the page at www.Cato-University.org.)

It’s sketchy (since I talked and explained the terms, etc. ), but here are the graphics: Presentation1