Substantially increased wealth inequality across the developed world has prompted many philosophers, economists and legal theorists to support comprehensive taxes on all forms of wealth. Proposals include levying taxes on the basis of total wealth, or alternatively the change in the value of capital holdings measured from year-to-year. This contrasts with most existing policies that… Read more »
Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom has been interpreted as a general warning against state intervention in the economy. NOUS Member Nick Cowen and Aris Trantidis review this argument in conjunction with Hayek’s later work and discern an institutional thesis about which forms of state intervention and economic institutions could threaten personal and political freedom. The full paper… Read more »
How sexuality should be regulated in a liberal political community is an important, controversial theoretical and empirical question—as shown by the recent criminalization of possession of some adult pornography in the United Kingdom. Supporters of criminalization argue that Mill, often considered a staunch opponent of censorship, would support prohibition due to his feminist commitments. Nick… Read more »
It seems that the “globalization” has failed. Instead, a rising number of people in the Western world prefer old nationalist and protectionist policies. One reason may be the challenge by structural change. In this paper, NOUS member Ralph Wrobel examines the question if any structural change and any spread of income in the Western World… Read more »
“On regular issues of policy reform—presupposing a stable integrated polity— Hume, Smith, and Burke were liberal in the original political meaning of ‘liberal.’ Thus, on policy reform, although they accorded the status quo a certain presumption (as any reasonable person must), the more distinctive feature is that they maintained (even propounded, most plainly in Smith’s case)… Read more »
Wilhelm Röpke is one of the most influential liberal thinkers of the 20th century and one of the main protagonists of the Social Market Economy in Germany. Nevertheless, his legacy is not undisputed: Without doubt, he was an uncompromising advocate of a free, open and humane society, but at the same time his late writings… Read more »
In their latest paper, NOUS member Justus Haucap and Kai Fischer examine the relation between crowd support and home advantage in professional soccer. For that purpose, they make use of a unique “natural experiment”: so-called ghost games in the three top divisions of German professional soccer during the Corona pandemic. They find that there is… Read more »
Among twentieth-century inheritors of the classical liberal mantle, the notion that democracy could be understood as “government by discussion” is found most prominently in the work of Frank H. Knight and James M. Buchanan. In this paper, NOUS Member Ross Emmet compares Knight and Buchanan’s use of the expression “democracy is government by discussion” The… Read more »