Hostage Extraction Needs to be Privatized
2023-11-04
Amidst hostage scenarios, like the Hamas situation, it is important to remember why governments should not pay to have their nationals released. Paying for hostages to be released creates a perverse incentive in which more people are taken hostage to receive more payments. This is undoubtedly a subpar outcome.
Furthermore, any effort by governments to reclaim hostages makes their country’s nationals more prone to being taken hostage. Payments and alternative methods of extraction rely on the use of resources stolen from the taxpayer by the government. Let’s break it down.
The research paper “Bounties, Grants, and Market-Making Entrepreneurship” by David Lucas and Caleb Fuller finds that—in a variety of bounty programs (programs that pay out a reward to private actors for completing a
Blaming the Free Market (Even Where It Doesn’t Exist)
2023-11-03
Critics of the free market often aim at the wrong target. They assail the market for “failures” that are actually the result of government intervention in the economy. In this week’s column, I’d like to discuss an example of this mistake in Angus Deaton’s Economics in America (Princeton, 2023).
Deaton was the winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for economics, about which he says:
As many previous recipients have reported, the experience is both exhilarating and overwhelming. I often think of the story of the dog that liked to chase buses but had little idea of what it would be like to catch one. The Nobel is not just catching the bus but being run over by it. Over and over again.
As you will have gathered, Deaton is very funny. In a section of the book called “Trying to Be a Good Hip-Op