OpenMarket: Property Rights

Recently economics professor Walter Block of Loyola University New Orleans wrote a great op-ed for The Wall Street Journal titled “Bad Capitalism and Good Socialism.” It helps clarify some confusion about the relative merits of different economic systems and the ostensible aspects of capitalism and socialism that people most often object to.

Predatory governments with high corruption, that don’t respect political and economic freedoms, are extractive. Countries with these sorts of institutions tend to be both poor and repressive. Countries with inclusive institutions, such as strong property rights, democratic accountability, and the rule of law, tend to be both wealthy and free.

Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey announced that the social media platform will ban all political advertising. This comes on the heels of Facebook’s recent announcement that the company won’t fact check political ads on their platform. Whichever tack tech companies take with their privately owned platforms, there are no First Amendment implications. The First Amendment prevents only the government from making laws that abridge freedom of speech.

Making good on its promise in Executive Order 13868  to combat the abuse of section 401 of the Clean Water Act by states seeking to block fossil energy infrastructure projects, the Environmental Protection Agency today issued updated guidance for states on implementing this provision. 

The 21st century Venezuela is a failure. It failed because it adopted socialism. Paul Larkin, Senior Legal Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, remarked in his talk “The Framers’ View of Property” that “For about a year, we have been lectured about the alleged virtues of socialism, despite the fact that we have a living example in Venezuela of what socialism tends to produce: no power, no food, no water, military rule, and people forced to buy used toilet paper.”

Our friends at the Atlas Network have an excellent new video out about legal reform in India that is helping small businesspeople stand up to corrupt government officials and make an honest living.

Environmental regulations transfer substantial wealth and can be subject to the same political failure and regulatory pork-barreling that characterize economic regulation—perhaps more so, given the international scale of control sought, and some of the movement’s anti-market roots.  

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has proposed a new wealth tax. We don’t know a lot of details on what is being proposed, but what little we do know suggests there is a constitutional problem. The Washington Post reported yesterday that Warren is being advised by two economists “on a proposal to levy a 2 percent wealth tax on Americans with assets above $50 million, as well as a 3 percent wealth tax on those who have more than $1 billion.”

The prohibition on taking a person’s liberty without due process of law is enshrined in the Constitution’s Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. But what does this mean? Does “liberty” only mean not being imprisoned, as some people have claimed, or is it far broader than that? In a new post on the Federalist Society’s blog, I argue that liberty, as originally understood by our Founders, was far broader than lack of imprisonment.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute views most market failure rationales for government intervention as wrong, overstated, or unproven (or all of the above). The Competitive Enterprise Institute views most market failure rationales for government intervention as wrong, overstated, or unproven (or all of the above). That belief is very difficult to test, however, because government has seized control of the relevant resources and blocks the market discovery process.