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… is from page 127 of my late, great colleague Walter Williams’s 1982 book America: A Minority Viewpoint [original emphasis]:

Under natural law, individuals own themselves. From this it follows that an individual has the right to any material goods he produces and to dispose of these goods as he sees fit. But this right is violated when government “redistributes” income. Politicians say that all Americans have a right to food, shelter, and decent medical care. But what they are really saying is that some people have the right to take my money, through government coercion, and give it to others. I would like to know: Under what interpretation of “human rights” do some people have the right to take what another man has produced?

The post Quotation of the Day… appeared first on Cafe Hayek.

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George Will is correct: “America needs immigrants as much as they need liberty’s blessings.” Three slices:

Two dissimilar government agencies have inadvertently combined to clarify the immigration debate. Stomach-turning excesses by Immigration and Customs Enforcement have turned many Americans’ abstract political preference into something uncomfortably concrete. And the Census Bureau has demonstrated that the nation needs immigrants as much as they need the blessings of American liberty.

Given a clear binary choice — for or against deporting immigrants who are here illegally — most Americans favor deportation. However:

One Sunday, a moderately pro-deportation American goes, as usual, for brunch at the neighborhood diner. Jose, who has put waffles in front of this American for 20 years, and who regularly exchanges pleasantries with him about their families, is gone. He has been deported for America’s improvement. Suddenly, the immigration issue has a face, and complexity.

…..

A recent Cato Institute report (“Immigrants’ Recent Effects on Government Budgets: 1994-2023”) says: Immigrants “generated more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government.” They “created a cumulative fiscal surplus of $14.5 trillion in real 2024 US dollars,” including $3.9 trillion in savings on interest that did not need to be paid on debt that was not added.

Immigrants were, on average, more than 12 percent more likely to be employed than the U.S.-born population. Cato: “In 1994, the immigrant share of government expenditures was 18 percent below their share of the population; in 2023, it was 25 percent below.”

…..

As Cato notes, many illegal immigrants who are employed under borrowed or stolen identities have taxes withheld by employers but are ineligible for many government benefits. And they are less likely than others to file returns in order to claim refunds. This is another reason why Cato says:

“Immigrants have created an enormous fiscal surplus for the US government … The $14.5 trillion in savings from immigrants is the equivalent of 33 percent of the total inflation-adjusted combined deficits from 1994 to 2023 without immigrants.”

That fellow having brunch at the diner will still get his waffles. But he will miss Jose, and millions like him, in more ways than he can easily imagine.

My GMU and Mercatus Center colleague Pete Boettke and his co-author Gabriel Giguère explain that AI will not be able to replace the free market. A slice:

Economic coordination does not begin with a giant spreadsheet of given facts. The knowledge that matters is dispersed across millions of individuals. It is local, contextual, and often tacit. A shop owner knows her neighbourhood customers. A machinist senses subtle changes in production. An entrepreneur imagines a product that has never existed before. Much of this knowledge cannot be fully articulated, let alone uploaded into a database.

Most importantly, prices—the signals that guide decisions—are not raw facts about the world waiting to be harvested by an algorithm. Prices emerge from real exchanges based on private property and freedom of contract. When the price of lithium rises, it is because buyers and sellers are competing over scarce resources. The price increase communicates something about relative scarcity, but it also gives people an incentive to adjust in order to conserve, to innovate, to search for substitutes.

Prices are not inputs to the system, but outputs of a dynamic discovery process (see Figure 1). Without the process of exchange and production, without the haggling and bargaining in the market, the knowledge embedded in a price simply doesn’t come into existence. This generative nature of the knowledge of the market is what Hayek was trying to get his peers to see, and why he even resorted to using the word “marvel” in his description of the price system.

Jon Miltimore exposes “antitrust’s dirty secret.” A slice:

In his 1996 book Antitrust and Monopoly: Anatomy of a Policy Failure, economist Dominick Armentano reviewed dozens of the most infamous monopolies in US history. He concluded that virtually all of them were the result of government protection, not an unfettered marketplace. “The general public,” wrote Armentano, “has been deluded into believing that monopoly is a free-market problem, and that the government, through antitrust enforcement, is on the side of the ‘angels.’ The facts are exactly the opposite.”

Looking at the state of antitrust today, it increasingly appears to be rooted more in a hostility to “bigness” than in a principled concern for consumers. This is folly. Size alone is not evidence of economic harm. In many industries, scale is precisely what allows firms to better serve customers.

Mergers and acquisitions don’t always succeed, but when they do, they generate real economic benefits. They enable companies to achieve economies of scale, cut overhead, integrate new technologies, and streamline supply chains. They also foster entrepreneurship and allow stronger firms to rescue struggling ones.

Butler University emeritus professor Peter Grossman’s letter in today’s Wall Street Journal is excellent:

Allysia Finley (“How America’s Oil and Gas Dominance Has Weakened Iran,” Life Science, March 9) is right to celebrate U.S. energy development but misses an important reason we no longer have 1970s-type energy crises.

The main reasons for the shortages in 1973 and 1979 were U.S. government price and quantity controls on the oil market. Natural-gas prices were also government controlled. While it is true that the Arab embargo of 1973-74 and the Iranian revolution in 1979 did reduce market supply, neither caused the shortages nor the palpable sense of crisis. Had there been no U.S. government controls, the prices of oil and oil products would have risen more and more quickly, but there wouldn’t have been shortages. When controls were lifted in the early 1980s, the age of gas and oil shortages ended.

Ms. Finley includes the first Gulf War alongside the Arab embargo and Iranian revolution. But what happened then proves my point. While prices spiked amid the conflict and Americans feared a return of gas lines, the lines didn’t materialize because prices were no longer controlled. We also didn’t experience supply crises in the 2000s or during the Arab Spring.

Of course, Americans are upset by higher prices, but we’ve lived with high gas and oil prices before and we will again. More worrisome is the report that President Trump wants to do something to lower gas prices. The last time the government “did something” we had oil and gas crises lasting a decade.

My advice: leave the oil market alone.

Peter Van Doren looks at the effects of oil shocks.

Christian Britschgi writes insightfully about the bipartisan, economically clueless assault on build-to-rent housing. Two slices:

Oren Cass, chief economist of American Compass and apparently determined to never be on the right side of an issue, argues that a ban on build-to-rent housing can’t reduce housing supply because such a ban does not vaporize land, workers, and materials that could be employed for new home construction.

…..

To take the latter point first, it’s true that policy alone does not physically destroy the things that are used to build new homes. Contra Cass, policy can make market actors a lot less likely to finance the construction of new homes.

Which is what a ban on build-to-rent housing would do.

There are hundreds of thousands of families out there that would like to live in a new single-family home but do not want, or cannot qualify for, a mortgage. The build-to-rent market has popped up to service this niche of home-seekers.

Unable to meet the needs of single-family renters, investors will thus move their capital elsewhere. Perhaps some of that capital goes into for-sale housing or apartment development—likely, much of the capital leaves the housing market altogether.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal applauds the U.S. senators who voted against the Trump-backed bill that would further intrude government into the housing market. A slice:

Ditto Hawaii Democrat Brian Schatz. “We have decided, for no particular reason other than what I think is a drafting error, to demonize people who want to build rental housing for folks,” Mr. Schatz said. Mr. Cruz echoed this objection, noting the bill restricts “new rental housing for Americans by requiring build-to-rent homes to be sold within seven years.”

The Senators are referring to a provision that would ban institutional investors from buying homes to rent, with an unworkable exception for those that are built-to-rent. Investors would be required to sell these homes to individual buyers within seven years of acquiring them. But low- and middle-income folks who rent these homes can’t afford to buy them.

That’s the reason home builders are constructing them to rent. Higher mortgage rates and housing prices have locked many people out of the market. But institutional investment enables hundreds of thousands of families to live in homes, rather than cramped apartments.

Build-to-rent homes make up a growing share of home construction, especially in Sun Belt states like Florida and Texas. The American Enterprise Institute’s Ed Pinto and Tobias Peter note that some 153,628 build-to-rent homes are in the construction pipeline. The bill would effectively bar investors from buying these homes and result in less construction.

Joe Salerno remembers Roger Garrison.

César Báez reports on “how Chile’s free market miracle survived a resurgent left.”

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Brian Doherty, a longtime Reason senior editor and the leading historian of the libertarian movement, was found dead Friday morning after a fall the night before in Battery Yates park along the San Francisco Bay. He was 57.

Doherty, who began working at Reason in 1994, was the author of six books, most notably the definitive 2007 study, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. Conservative writer Jonah Goldberg called Radicals an "extraordinary accomplishment"; libertarian economist Bryan Caplan dubbed it a "remarkable labor of love."

Doherty's other book-length treatments of libertarian phenomena included Gun Control on Trial: Inside the Supreme Court Battle Over the Second Amendment (2008), Ron Paul's rEVOLution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired (2012), and Modern Libertarianism: A Brief History of Classical Liberalism in the United States (2025).

"Brian was the historian of the libertarian movement," says Reason Foundation President David Nott. "He lovingly and comprehensively portrayed the colorful characters in the libertarian world."

Born in Brooklyn and raised mostly in Florida, Doherty first caught the libertarian bug at age 12 by gobbling up the Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.

"One of the specific purposes of that work, according to Wilson, was to do to the state what Voltaire did to the church—that is, reduce it to an object of contempt for all thoughtful people," he recalled in 2018. "I wound up mail ordering a copy of the Principia Discordia, the founding religious document of the Discordian Church discussed in Illuminatus! I tracked down this volume in the rich, fascinating, and frightening catalog of the bookseller Loompanics. Afterward I delved deeper into its offerings of forbidden or hated ideas, eventually ordering a copy of Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. That book's version of economics matched the ethical conclusion that felt undeniable to me after reading Illuminatus!: that shaping the human social order primarily by granting one set of people working under an institutional cover the poorly restricted right to rob, assault, and kill others at their will seemed like a bad idea."

Hazlitt led to Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, and above all Murray Rothbard, the latter of whom, fittingly, was the subject of Doherty's last piece published before his death, "100 Years of Murray Rothbard."

While majoring in journalism at the University of Florida, Doherty "met some congenial and hilarious people manning a booth for the…College Libertarians in the autumn of 1987," and was off to the races, mixing intense philosophical curiosity with an equally deep interest and participation in the more animal spirits of DIY music and expressive freedom.

Relocating to Los Angeles in the mid-'90s, he fell in with "a gang of arty pranksters you've likely never heard of" called the Cacophony Society, who "inspired or created phenomenon ranging from the novel/movie Fight Club to urban exploration, billboard alteration, the Yes Men, flash mobs, and 'Santa Rampages.'"

Cacophony's most lasting stunt was the one that evolved into the annual temporary art festival in Nevada called Burning Man. "I thought my deskbound, magazine-reporter, bedroom record label–running self would be destroyed by the pitiless desert," Doherty would later recall. "So I didn't go in '94. By 1995, I had heard so much about Black Rock City's functional anarchy that I had to go—anarchy being one of my primary intellectual interests."

Those words can be found in the prologue of Doherty's first book, 2004's This Is Burning Man: The Rise of a New American Underground, which grew out of a 2000 Reason cover story. He never stopped going to Burning Man, nor participating wholeheartedly in obscure art/music happenings that some of his bemused work colleagues would find almost as inscrutable as some of his counterculture pals viewed libertarianism.

"Brian's contributions to the art scenes in L.A. and San Francisco were monumental," says his best friend, the showman/experience designer Chicken John Renaldi. "His passing leaves so many people and so many systems impoverished."

Doherty's knowledge of pop culture, rock music, and comic books was encyclopedic, as evidenced not just by his heroically cluttered workspaces but by his 2022 book, Dirty Pictures: How an Underground Network of Nerds, Feminists, Misfits, Geniuses, Bikers, Potheads, Printers, Intellectuals, and Art School Rebels Revolutionized Art and Invented Comix.

"Libertarians talk a lot about freedom and responsibility. Brian embodied both," Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward recalls. "His weird, colorful life—filled with comics and festivals and music and books—was a model of life lived freely and openly. And in his thinking, reporting, and editing, he was one of the most conscientious and responsible people I have ever met. A libertarian hero in every sense."

Spelunking in subcultures both libertarian and whimsical led to a lot of early discoveries that the normies only sussed out later. Doherty profiled New Hampshire's Free State Project way back in 2004, caught Seasteaders on their then-rise in 2009, and started covering Bitcoin in 2013. Though, as he ruefully admitted later, he knew about the groundbreaking crypto currency as early as July 2010 yet somehow neglected to cash in.

"Had I shelled out, say, $2,000 on this innovative, anti-inflationary currency even a lazy six weeks after I was introduced to it," he wrote, "today I would be sitting on 28,571 bitcoins, the equivalent at press time of over $212 million in cash." More like $2 billion now, but who's counting?

After news of his death broke, Doherty's work colleagues filled up a long Slack thread with fond memories of his deep-seated sense of tolerance, his garrulous laugh, his fury at personal technology, his sometimes elliptical prose style. A staffer once made a T-shirt from a typically verbose Dohertian Slack message: "I try not to assume that because crazy people with crazy beliefs believe or used to believe the things I believe for what I think are right and sane reasons, that that is a sign that I am crazy. But it's getting harder and harder I confess."

Doherty in recent years had suffered from a series of physical ailments and setbacks that left him walking with a cane. It is likely that condition contributed to his deadly tumble Thursday, as he took a stroll away from—of course!—an art gathering atop an abandoned World War 2 gun battery. More details are expected to emerge next week, though the (terrible) news remains the same.

What we're left with is a sui generis body of work. Explorations of "the hippie capitalism of the Grateful Dead." Massive oral histories of the Libertarian Party and Reason. A full-throated libertarian critique/condemnation of a man many of his fellow Rothbardians took a flier on, Donald Trump.

"He and his work will be missed," former Reason Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie tweeted Saturday. "And more important, remembered."

The post Brian Doherty, Historian of the Libertarian Movement, Dead at 57 appeared first on Reason.com.

The truth of course is that ‘Net Zero’ is an article of faith. A state religion masquerading as a moral crusade despite the evidence it is expensive, ineffective, and generally regressive.

Low carbon subsidies transfer wealth from the general population to landowners and corporations. It’s state socialism delivering a caricature of pre-Corn Laws Toryism.

– Andy Mayer

The response to the Iran-Hezbollah drone attack on Britain’s Royal Air Force Base in Cyprus earlier this month has been revealing. For the first time since 1980, Britain had no warships in the eastern Mediterranean or the Gulf. Air defences were effectively absent. The UK’s main carrier strike group was still en route to Greenland. Britain ended up having to rely on Greece and France to help secure its own military base. That is not evidence of foreign capture. It is evidence of institutional incompetence.

– Jacob Reynolds