Anarchy and Efficient Law

Earlier this year I gave a talk in Brazil based on an old book chapter. The central argument is that the producers of law in a system such as that I described in The Machinery of Freedom, unlike the producers of law in a conventional political system, have an incentive to generate economically efficient law—for reasons similar but not identical to the reasons why other producers in private markets have an incentive to produce the products that consumers most value. In the talk I also discuss the reasons why the law generated will fall short of being perfectly efficient, due to imperfections of that particular market.

It has now been webbed.

Maybe He Really Is a Liberal: Part II

In a recent post, I raised the possibility that the leader of the Liberal Democrats in the U.K., now deputy Prime Minister, might in fact be a liberal in the old sense of the word, or at least something close. A recent news story provides one more bit of evidence in favor of that optimistic conjecture.