The Independent Review

Often, the policy of a central bank may be described as easy or tight depending upon the rate of new money creation or the interest rates charged or targeted by the central bank. When the bank increases the rate of money creation, that is a sign of easy money. When it lowers interest rates, that is yet another sign of easing. Movements in the opposite direction are believed to indicate monetary tightening. The devil, however, is in the details. Policies that one might characterize as being easy or tight may be incorrectly attributed one of the descriptions (Sumner 2021). For example, lowering interest rates during recession without simultaneous expansion of circulating currency appears an ineffective policy for lifting aggregate demand back to the pre-recession trend. The problem of evaluating policy…

In all developed countries, children are required to attend school until they have reached the age of about fifteen. This requirement is justified because basic schooling is beneficial not only to the individual but also to societal development. Indeed, an educated population is a necessary condition for a wide range of key modern values and institutions that benefit people at large, including democracy, human rights, technological innovation, and economic growth.1 Hence, education may be seen as a public good, comparable to an orderly judicial system, mass transportation, and a robust national defense. Yet it is not simply the number of years that children spend in a school system that produces the many benefits associated with education; students may spend many years in school without contributing to the common good. The…

“But if any provide not for his own, and especially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an unbeliever.”1 Timothy 5:8 Child support enforcement (CSE) involves the establishment of paternity and the securing of child support payments from noncustodial parents. For many custodial parents, child support payments are made to the state to offset the cost of Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) and other welfare programs. Child support enforcement has failed in that the fraction of custodial parents who receive child support awards has fallen, and among those with awards, even fewer receive the full amount of mandated payments. These problems are most pronounced among custodial parents in vulnerable communities. Instead of increasing support for custodial parents, efforts to enforce child support…

The right to private property is capitalism’s institutional cornerstone. Anonymous, impersonal exchange—which generates the market prices that guide people’s choices—is easier and more extensive when private property rights are secure. Prices also guide entrepreneurial discovery and make it possible to calculate the profits and losses that tell people when they have corrected (or exacerbated) errors in the structure of production. Private property rights form the institutional context in which people learn, via the resulting market prices, profits, and losses, when resources have been allocated efficiently or wastefully (Kirzner 1973). The ultimate judges of whether an allocation is “efficient” or “wasteful” are the sovereign consumers, who express their beliefs and values through their decisions to buy or abstain (Hutt 1936 [1990], 257–72). Private property rights serve an important allocative function, and…

Do interest groups lobby their political friends or their foes? This paper applies Richard Hall and Alan Deardorff’s (2006) theory of lobbying as a legislative subsidy to the case of labor rights lobbying in Brazil’s 1988 Assembleia Nacional Constituinte (ANC), providing a unique case study for examining not only the targets of interest groups but also the ability of lobbying models to explain the interest groups’ strategic behavior. This article aims to expand Hall and Deardorff’s theoretical model and apply it to the real-world context of Brazil’s 1988 National Constituent Assembly. The paper concludes that in the ANC, the prolabor-rights lobbying efforts targeted both friends and uncommitted foes. There is a robust literature addressing the targets of interest groups’ lobbying tactics. Some studies find that lobbying groups seek to influence opposition…

I suggest that two features of Adam Smith’s talk of justice and liberty reflect a priority on instilling duties, as opposed to instilling rights. The first feature has to do with his manner of talking “justice”; I distinguish between calling loudly and proffering coolly. The second feature is Smith’s refraining in his two great works from using “liberty” in expansive senses of the term. I treat each feature in turn. Calling Loudly In Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), Adam Smith writes of “loud” calls and objections (TMS 71.5, 73.2, 74.4, 84.2, 105.2, and 131.33).1 Loudness constitutes a disturbance, a demand on other people’s attention. In the opening pages, he writes: “If we hear a person loudly lamenting his misfortunes, which, however, upon bringing the case home to ourselves, we feel, can produce…