Salut, mes amis! After two days in Riems, France (8-9 June), I will be attending a conference in Paris on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations on Wednesday afternoon, 10 June. Details are available here.
Fred Schauer was a prolific legal scholar (see here). The essays in this special issue of the Virginia Law Review celebrate the life and work of Professor Schauer. Hat tip: Larry Solum
Via Le Monde: “French sociologist, philosopher, and intellectual provocateur Edgar Morin has died aged 104.” (Also, here is the NYT obit.)
Professor Solum featured (and recommended!) my recent work on “The Buchanan-Samuels Exchange” on his Legal Theory blog (see here), where he reports and comments on recent scholarship in jurisprudence and constitutional law. Here is the paper.
It’s insane to think that there are still Marxists out there, most of whom live comfortable lives in wealthy capitalist countries. Back in 2019, my colleague (and new friend!) Mike Huemer wrote (my emphasis):
“I’ve been known to cite Marxism as an example of an irrational political belief. This is controversial in intellectual circles (indeed, some will probably be outraged by this post), but that doesn’t prevent it from being clearly true; it just means that certain forms of irrationality are popular in intellectual circles. In fact, I regard Marxism as the paradigm of an irrational political belief; if it’s not irrational, nothing is. The theory has been as soundly refuted as a social theory can be. Sometimes, people ask me to explain why I say this.
“Let me start with why I say it’s been soundly refuted.
“a. Theoretical developments: Shortly after Marx wrote, his underlying economic theory was rejected by essentially the entire field and superseded by a better theory. Virtually no one who studies the subject (outside of oppressive Marxist regimes) believes the labor theory of value anymore. Without the labor theory of value, there’s no theory of surplus value, no theory of exploitation, and thus the central critique of capitalism fails. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read any standard text on price theory. If you learn modern price theory, you are going to agree with it, and you are going to reject the labor theory as well. It’s that clear.
“b. Historical developments: Marxism was tried many times. It was tried in many countries with different cultures, on every continent except Australia and Antarctica.
“By different people, with different variations on the theory, at different times. Every time it went horribly wrong. Not just once or twice, and not just slightly wrong. In the best cases, it resulted in severe poverty and abuse of power. In the worst, it resulted in the greatest human atrocities in history. In total, between 100 and 150 million people were killed by their own, Marxist governments in the twentieth century. To be a Marxist, as far as I understand what that means, is to believe that, knowing all this, we should try again.
“c. Predictability: In case you are tempted to say that Marx couldn’t have anticipated this: yes, he could. It’s hardly difficult to figure out that giving total power to the state might cause some problems — it’s not as if the history of government had been completely clean up til the 20th century, when suddenly, for the first time in history, people with power started to abuse it. Nor is this just some right-wing ideological point.”
Continue readingThat is the title of a new book by Anthony Gottlieb on the life and ideas of the great but perplexing 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. (I found this 2025 book on the shelves of Shakespeare and Company, an English-language bookshop in Paris.) Among many other things, I have learned that the would-be philosopher had patented an idea for a new type of aircraft propeller in 1911 (see here, for example), when he just 21 years old! (p. 53) I will report back soon.
This was the first song I heard (and Shazamed) after arriving in Nice, France, last week!
Following up on my previous post, I want to explain the logic of Scott Scheall’s explanation of Elon Musk’s failed DOGE project, or what I like to call Scheall’s theorem, which can be summed up in three words: goals require knowledge. Or in Scheall’s words: “To deliberately realize goal G, policymakers must possess knowledge K. If policymakers lack knowledge K, they cannot deliberately realize goal G.” That is, in order to achieve some desired outcome or objective, a person or firm must have some level of know-how about what steps to take, and in what sequence, in order to accomplish his aims. Stated in formal terms, we can say that the probability that an actor A will achieve a given goal G is a function of A’s level of knowledge K. Or stated even more simply: K is a necessary, though not a sufficient, condition of G.
What is so beautiful about Scheall’s theorem is not just its simplicity but also its generality, for we can extend the logic of Scheall’s argument to the government. By way of illustration, we might want the government to accomplish some lofty goal, such as the eradication of poverty or the reduction of greenhouse gases or the elimination of wasteful spending, and the government, in turn, might have the power to issue orders towards those ends — what I like to call the “pretense of power” in honor of F. A. Hayek (see here or here, for example). But without sufficient knowledge about how to actually carry out its commands, it is highly unlikely that such goals, however well-intentioned, will actually be accomplished in a cost-effective or timely manner. Given Scheall’s theorem, the surprise is not that Elon Musk’s DOGE project failed; instead, the surprise for me is that it failed so quickly: DOGE was quietly shut down within eight months of its creation.
Did you know that Elon Musk’s “DOGE” project — the misnamed Department of Government Efficiency — ended up costing the government four times more money that it saved? My favorite talk, by far, at this year’s joint meeting of the North American and European economic history societies was “Liberalism’s ouroboros: DOGE and the transition problem in stark relief” by my colleague and friend Scott Scheall (University of Austin). Among other things, Scheall explained why DOGE was such a spectacular failure. (I will summarize the logic of his argument in the next day or two. In the meantime, here is a podcast featuring Professor Scheall.)
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