Reputation is possible in a small community, but in the Smith-Lippman-Hayekian Great Society people are mainly strangers. I model credit reporting as a system of formalized and surgically-precise gossip. In the Great Society credit reporting makes possible reputations, which make possible credit...

Is it just to pursue honest income? Certainly it's commutatively just. But is it a becoming use of one's own? Is it distributively just? Presumptively, yes. The burden of proof should be on the one who denies that someone's pursuit of honest income is distributively just. Drawing closely on Adam...

#WalkAway signifies walking away from the Democratic Party. The movement was launched in June 2018 by Brandon Straka, when he uploaded what became the prototypical video of an individual telling his or her story about walking away. During 130 days, 150 erstwhile Democrats provided video...

Ostension is the act or process of showing, as in showing a child a fossil while saying “fossil.” Here collected are 59 quotations about language, discourse, ostension, and semantics. A theme is the “facts are theory-laden” spiral between language and discourse, between explananda and...

This piece is a review of Dennis C. Rasmussen's book, The Problems and Promise of Commercial Society: Adam Smith's Response to Rousseau (2008). The book superbly explains Rousseau's criticisms of commercial society and Smith's concern with and response to those criticisms. Rasmussen helps us...

What does Hume mean by liberty? Though clearly important to him, Hume never clarifies the matter explicitly. In his texts, liberty often seems to be a matter of government rules being certain, general, regular, etc., and often a matter of political form or constitution—the place of parliament...

In this paper, we investigate whether a statement like “the reform ought to be favored” is practically the same as “the reform would yield positive net consequences.” The first statement, featuring “ought,” is one that many economists would deem “normative,” the second,...

Adam Smith was allegorical, knowingly and profoundly, but after him things went downhill, or even dropped off a cliff. From science anxieties many liberals spurned allegory, touting foundations, facts, science, etc. But we see in their discourse, notably on the economic system as cooperation,...