Reforming the Housing Transaction offers suggested improvements in the real estate process.
Who Needs Home Ownership? suggests that the social benefits of home onwership are overstated.
How to Think About QE3 gives an “on the one hand, on the other” analysis.
Subjective Value and Government Intervention looks at how the Austrian economics focus on subjective value tends to bias one against government intervention. Conversely, justification for government intervention often seems to require an expert to calculate value objectively, and this is problematic.
Libertarians and Group Norms points out that libertarians may not have a simple way to respond to the fact that people display group loyalty.
The essay on the concept of subjective value is brilliant. Thank you.
Arnold – I’m glad you decided to rejoin the blogosphere. Welcome back!
In the closing of your “Subjective Value and Government Intervention” essay, you wrote: “For me, the doctrine of subjective value does not automatically preclude government intervention.”
For you, does anything preclude government intervention? If so, what?
It seems that subjective value at least makes a very strong case against it, no?
I’m glad to see you back in the blogosphere, Dr. Kling,
I enjoyed your essay on libertarians and group norms. Having sympathized with libertarian (and Randian) ideas my whole adult life, I’ve always found pure libertarianism unable to rebut criticisms summed up by E.O. Wilson’s jibe about Marxism: “great theory, wrong species.” It was refreshing to read your review of libertarian (and pre-libertarian) thinking on this matter.
In my view, if you marry libertarian sensibilities with a realistic understanding of human nature, you get something like classic liberalism. I’m thinking of a liberalism that throws off the old shackles of caste (both formal aristocracy and the racial and ethnic pecking order typical of the world we grew up in) while declining to don the new shackles of the welfare state. I don’t claim that this liberalism was ever the majority view anywhere. But it could have been and ought to have been in our country (the US) since the dawn of the civil rights movement.
In modern discourse people with these views are deemed right-wing nuts, of course.
Ken
Who needs to own a home? Well, if you have six kids, like I do, the cost of owning is a LOT less than the cost of renting (if you can find anyone who will rent to a house with six kids) — so owning just makes sense! At least in my market.