Donald J. Boudreaux

On Family Leave, Leave the Market Be

Social engineering done by those on the political right is nearly always as destructive as is social engineering done by those on the political left.

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The Economics of Paid Leave

The fact that the market does not supply as much paid leave as people would want if they did not have to pay full price for it is not a market failure; it’s a market success.

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The Myth of Budget-Neutral Spending

Advocates of new government programs often promise that their programs are budget neutral — meaning that adoption of these programs will not increase net government spending. It’s never true. 

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If We Put a Man on the Moon, We Can Surely…

We can admire the engineering prowess that enabled NASA to land men on the moon and return them safely to earth. But even if politicians (contrary to fact) were apolitical stewards of the public welfare, governing society is not an engineering task. It follows that NASA’s remarkable achievement emphatically does not imply that we should look to government to solve our problems.

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Books On Liberty that You Haven’t Read but Should

This great variety of influential books testifies to the richness of the libertarian scholarly tradition. It’s filled with remarkable works of scholarship that are not (yet) as widely known and read as they deserve to be.

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The Fallacy of Us, We, and Our

Talk of “our” balance of trade is talk of something that doesn’t really exist; it’s merely a figment of the imagination made to appear real by an accounting convention that has the name “trade balance.” Nevertheless, this fictitious creature is daily demagogued by those seeking to clear the way for protectionist interventions.

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Bastiat: Storyteller and Theorist

I submit that Bastiat ranks, at the very least, among the greatest of all applied economic theorists. His work should be more widely known; it deserves much greater professional respect.

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