Liberty, Economics, and Evidence

Reading Rasmussen and Den Uyl: Critical Essays on Norms of Liberty, 2008

The book, "Norms of Liberty," offers a refreshing new voice in the debate about the nature and normative grounds of a free society. Though I disagree with the version of liberalism Rasmussen and Den Uyl propose, and ultimately find their derivation of it from neo-Aristotelian ethics unconvincing, this book will stimulate a valuable debate about the prospects for a rapprochement between liberal normative theory and neo-Aristotelian ethics. One of the most salient contributions of Norms of Liberty, at least in this reader’s opinion, is its reminder that we must somehow rise to the challenge of grounding our political principles in a view of the good life without mistaking them for the whole of the good life; while one of its most significant shortcomings is its adoption of an absolute principle of negative liberty rather than a more moderate principle of freedom to be interpreted and applied by practical reason in conjunction with other requirements of human flourishing.

Global Business and Economics Review, 2013

The preoccupation with economic growth has not led to increase in happiness in the developed world. More than that, the world experienced the worst financial crisis of 2008 since the Great Depression. We draw on Sen's work Development as Freedom and research on economics of happiness to explore the situations when increasing instrumental freedoms have not resulted in overall increase in happiness. The prescriptive part of the paper offers some solutions to the problem.

2008

Human freedom, and therefore, quality of life in many countries of the world have been restricted and diminished. Economic freedom and a controversial issue of interrelationship between economic and political freedom are empirically examined here. In several empirical estimations, embodying 155 countries of the world, some tight as well as statistically significant relationships are detected between economic freedom, on the

In Part IV, Chapter I of this book, Adam Smith mainly talks about the motivation of people chasing power and money, and how this personal pursuit, though driven by selfishness, can contribute to public welfare.

The Journal of Regional Analysis and Policy, 2013

In this paper we test the relationship between changes in economic freedom and wellbeing. Unlike previous work which has relied on international data sets, the novelty of this paper is that we use state-level data. Using the economic freedom measures provided by the Fraser Institute and a recently published data set on well-being across states, we find that improvements in economic freedom lead to increases in well-being for the average state. Further analysis shows that the presence of regional variations across the states may in fact suggest differences in optimal freedom levels between regions.

2013

2010

Abstract: This paper explores possible disagreement between direct and overall liberty. Direct liberty corresponds to the inherent aspects of a policy reform (and its concomitant enforcement), while overall liberty subsumes also its wider and long-run aspects. Both direct and overall liberty are important, and each has virtues relative to the other. The virtue of direct liberty is its concreteness and definiteness. The virtue of overall liberty is its fuller accounting of an action's consequences in terms of liberty.

In Free Market Fairness, John Tomasi tries to show that ‘thick’ economic liberties, including the right to own productive property, are basic liberties. According to Tomasi, the policy-level consequences of protecting economic liberty as basic are essentially libertarian in character. I argue that if economic liberties are basic, just societies must guarantee their fair value to all citizens. And in order to secure the fair value of economic liberty, states must guarantee that citizens of roughly similar dispositions and talents are roughly equally able to use their economic liberties to develop and pursue a conception of the good. This, I will argue, is a very demanding standard that requires aggressive taxation and redistribution.

Applied Economics Letters, 2016

Within the field of public economics, there is the perception that Republicans are associated with 'small government' and Democrats with 'big government'. We test this notion by examining whether economic freedom is affected when a single party is in control of the state legislature. We find no link between party control and our main economic freedom indicator, but we do find a positive link between Republican control and the taxation component of economic freedom, suggesting a Republican legislature leads to lower taxation.