[Conceived in Liberty: The New Republic, 1784–1791. By Murray N. Rothbard. Edited by Patrick Newman. Mises Institute, 2019. 332 pages.] We owe Patrick Newman a great debt for his enterprise and editorial skill in bringing to publication the fifth volume, hitherto thought lost, of Murray Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty.

Abstract: Austrian economists hold that money matters a great deal in concrete terms in the immediate short run and has permanent long-run effects. Sierońs book investigates the Cantillon effect, which indicates that money is not neutral because inevitabily it is injected unevenly, creating economic distortions. These distortions are important to the long run and the Austrian theory of the business cycle.

“Luck egalitarianism” is a philosophical fad, and in the past I have had some characteristically unkind things to say about it. I’d like today to discuss a new argument that concerns luck and government. The economist Robert H. Frank says in Under the Influence, Because successful people often fail to appreciate the importance of seemingly minor random events in life, they tend to develop an exaggerated sense of entitlement to the enormous material rewards they command in the marketplace.

Last week I discussed a new argument against paternalism in the important book of Mario Rizzo and Glen Whitman, Escaping Paternalism. Today I’d like to give the other side a chance. Robert H. Frank is an economist at Cornell University, well-regarded for his work on the emotions and usually anxious to stress the flaws of the free market. In his just-published Under the Influence, he offers, among many other things, a defense of high taxes on cigarettes, and this is what I’m going to talk about today.

Some economists, such as the 2017 Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler and his colleague Cass Sunstein, have proposed an unusual justification for government interference with people’s choices. They do not intend, they say, to override the preferences that people have. They don’t want to tell people what they “should” want, according to an external standard that people don’t accept. They claim, however, that accepting the actual preferences people have still leaves room for government intervention. How is this possible? Their answer is that people often choose in an irrational way.

It is bad enough that opponents of the free market wrongly blame capitalism for environmental pollution, depressions, and wars. Whatever the failings of their causal theories, at least they are focused on undoubtedly bad things. We have really gone beyond the pale, though, when the market is blamed for something good.

Eric Nelson, a Professor Government at Harvard, has published this year a brilliant and imaginative book, The Theology of Liberalism (Harvard University Press, 2019). Nelson, it should be said, is no leftist, despite what you might expect from his Harvard affiliation. To the contrary, he is a conservative and favors, though not to the fullest extent, the free market and private property rights.

Libertarians think that taxation is theft. The government takes away part of your income and property by force. Your payments aren’t voluntary. If you think they are, try to withhold payment and see what happens.
An influential book by Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel, The Myth of Ownership, tries to show that this view of taxation is wrong. Many people, they say, foolishly resent taxes.