Adam Smith on Self-Deceit
The University of Virginia Center for Politics, led by Larry Sabato, provides polling results that show deep social, political, and psychological divides between Biden voters and Trump…
Allegory and Political Economy: Communication and Cooperation
"We must look at the price system,” wrote Friedrich Hayek, “as . . . a mechanism for communicating information if we want to understand its real function.”…
Smith, Hume, and Burke as Policy Liberals and Polity Conservatives
To understand renovations being made to a building, it is good to understand the kind of order that the renovator hopes to establish. Edmund Burke writes to…
Corruption According to Adam Smith
That awful person! How can someone be so corrupt?! Be it Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, or someone else, Adam Smith pointed to an answer: “This self-deceit, this…
David Hume on Ancient Revolutions
The longest essay in the modern edition of David Hume’s Essays is “Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations,” first published in 1752. The essay aims to discomfort…
Grateful to Whom, or What?
My dear George Mason Economics colleague Donald Boudreaux looks back “with enormous gratitude” on his 61 years of life. The expression, he says, “isn’t about his parents.”…
Benevolence, Beneficence, and Beneficialness
I love to analyze sentiments, sympathies, and virtues. In doing so, it’s useful to distinguish several “b” words. Benevolence on the part of Mary is a sentiment…