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Who Puts the Self in Self-Interest?
Self-interest is at the heart of economic analysis. The primary assumption of economists is that people pursue their self-interest, or in the technical expression, that people seek to maximize utility defined by the utility function. The economist typically does not analyze the content of the preferences; rather, the preferences are taken as datum or as parameters to the economist’s problem. The business of economics is to understand how people with given preferences make choices under constraints.Social Security and the Free Society
Social Security has had a profound effect on the way Americans view the government’s role in society and on our confidence in the free society’s ability to solve difficult social problems. Make no mistake, the care of the aged is a difficult social problem that, in my opinion, cannot be solved through purely market means. To say that it cannot be addressed by means of economic exchange alone, however, is not to imply that public solutions are always preferable to private ones.Renewing Our Experiment in Ordered Liberty
In his breathtaking new book, A History of the American People, English historian Paul Johnson writes, “The creation of the United States of America is the greatest of all human adventures. No other national story holds such tremendous lessons, for the American people themselves and for the rest of mankind.… The great American republican experiment … is still the first, best hope for the human race” and “will not disappoint an expectant humanity.”Living Responsibly: Václav Havel's View
If you could have one chance to speak to the world’s most powerful political body, what would you say?The Role of Responsibility in a Free Society
One way to think about the role of responsibility in a free society is to imagine a society where freedom is absent. Writers from ancient times have drawn sketches of just this sort of society. These imagined Utopias–conjured up by Plato, Thomas More, and the medieval monk Campanella–have all been similar in their broad outlines. Property is held in common and distributed by the magistrates according to need. Children are raised collectively.Limitations of the Economic Way of Thinking
The noted ecological writer Bill McKibben began a recent article for Audubon magazine with the following suggestion for a thought experiment:
Liberal Arts Education in a Free Society
“Pompey now having ordered all things … took his journey homewards…. When he came to Mitylene, he gave the city their freedom … and was present at the contest, there periodically held, of poets…. He was extremely pleased with the theatre itself, and had a model of it taken, intending to erect one in Rome on the same design, but larger and more magnificent. When he came to Rhodes, he attended the lectures of all the philosophers there….The Ultimate Economic Resource
Friends of liberty lost a staunch ally earlier this year when Julian Simon passed away on February 8, just shy of his sixty-fifth birthday. He was infamous for his principled and fact-driven defense of the free society and its ability to unleash the creative force of the human person.Solving Problems by Elimination
We live in a time that places a high value on community. The European Economic Community, global markets, the global village, accords and governance--universal fraternity is the wave of the future. Consequently, Pope John Paul II's encyclical Centesimus Annus, with its emphasis on the human person in community, could be seen as simply following these current trends. For those not aware of its continuity with a living tradition, it appears to be an attempt to build bridges where there are none.Environmentalism: The Triumph of Politics
President Bill Clinton's commitment to an activist environmental agenda was apparent early in his administration. The problem is not that he favors conservation but that he supports political control of the environment. Unfortunately, despite the common assumption that government is the best means of protecting the environment, politics has more often thwarted than advanced sound ecological stewardship.
The Culture of Life, The Culture of the Market
Many who proclaim the culture of life fault the free market for devaluing human life and reducing people to mere economic actors, valued only for their earning potential or their productive capacity. Our times are characterized by a lack of respect for the dignity of the human person, but it is a tragedy to see our allies against the forces that degrade the human person hindered in their efforts because of a misunderstanding of the market economy.Evangelicals and Economics
What does the field of economics have to offer evangelicals? The embrace of economics should be more than merely an excuse to put forward naive views about public policy. Instead, evangelicals should embrace the “economic way of thinking”–a rigorous study of the benefits and costs of personal decisions and public policy. That said, the study of economics is frequently limited in scope; thus, evangelicals would do well to learn the economic way of thinking, using a biblical worldview and applying it to topics of biblical concern.