It is not impossible for there to be another economist of Milton Friedman’s stature, but it is unlikely. Milton had a rare combination of characteristics. His brilliance showed up in his economics work early in his life and led him to some major contributions that affected the profession’s...

Alamar and Glantz interpret smoking in restaurants as a market failure, and they claim that restaurants should welcome government laws that disallow smoking in all restaurants. Contrary to their claims, restaurant owners do have an incentive to eliminate smoking if doing so raises the value of...

In the September 2007 critique of Alamar and Glantz, I argued that smoking in restaurants (and bars) does not constitute an externality and that Alamar and Glantz’s use of cross-sectional data to derive a price/sales ratio did not show us a meaningful picture of what happened before and...

Economists laid much of the intellectual foundation for ending military conscription in the United States. Walter Oi and others laid out a solid analytic case against the draft, pointing out that the cost of a drafted military exceeded the cost of an all-volunteer force but that this cost fell...