As Ed reported, John Stossel interviewed us for his show titled “The War Against the Little Guy” (airing May 16 and replaying through May 19). The current link for Stossel  has only a short video clip that doesn’t include our interview, which appears later in the hour. But the link does have a short summary of the show, which ends with a nice summary of the main argument in Madmen (emphasis added):  Is there any hope for…
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Tune in to John Stossel’s show on the Fox Business Network, tonight at 9:00 p.m. Eastern, as Wayne and Ed will be interviewed about their new book, Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers. The eipsode will air again several times over the weekend. This episode of Stossel covers “The War on Small Business.” After interviewing other guests about unnecessary regulations that harm “the little guy,” Stossel then asks Wayne and Ed to explain how government sometimes deregulates. We describe how…
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Page 96 of Madmen offers a practical definition of that commonly misused term: The investment of valuable resources into activities that are counterproductive is what economists call “rent seeking.” Theft is a particularly vivid example. So is much of politics. This morning Tyler Cowen, via Mark Thorson, points to a vivid example in a Guardian news article, “ The Vending Machine Robot that Can Steal Free Sodas .” An enterprising young French man, however, has solved the problems of anyone who has encountered a malfunctioning vending…
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Here are a few pointers to, and summaries of, recent reviews of Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers. First, a review by Isaac Morehouse , who is a development officer at the Institute for Humane Studies . Madmen is, in many ways, a clear articulation of many of the ideas I’ve come to hold about social change. It details how  Public Choice Theory reveals  that governments have all the wrong incentives for positive change. It discusses the role of ideas, and how they are  able to overcome the vested interests  that Public Choice makes seem…
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RootsHQ, an online resource for the conservative movement, recently published an article with a title we use for this post: “ The Rise of the Political Entrepreneur .” The article is by Allen Fuller, the group’s managing partner. You don’t have to be a conservative to appreciate his observations on shifting influences in politics. In short, how people influence the process of political change has evolved tremendously over the last few decades. It’s an argument that Ed and I make in Madmen….
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Probably the most common reaction to our book has been people’s curiosity about the title. Who are these “madmen” and “academic scribblers”? What do you mean by intellectuals? That’s why whenever we give a talk on the book, we use this slide to offer up some examples: “Intellectuals” are middlemen of ideas who influence (deliberately or not) the way large numbers of people view the world around them. These worldviews find their way into individual…
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Margaret Thatcher has died at the age of 87. The New York Times posts an obituary . The Guardian lists some of her most well-known quotations . The “Iron Lady” leads off Chapter 5 of  Madmen (“How Ideas Matter for Political Change”). We recount a story of Thatcher that we found in John Blundell’s writings. Thatcher is one of the revolutionaries discussed under the heading “Maggie, Mart, and the Madmen,” which are the opening words of Chapter 5: It happened with Lenin rousing the…
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Today’s NY Times has a book review of  Big, Hot, Cheap and Right : What America Can Learn from the Strange Genius of Texas, by Erica Greider. Since Ed and I are Texans, we think the state has a lot to offer. The NY Times review argues that this book has a lot to offer, too, including analysis of an evolving political economy. Such as this: I tend to look askance at an analysis that attributes a company’s or a…
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The IEA generously offered me the opportunity to contribute a blog post on the Guatemalan telecom reform. This is a slightly different introduction to the case study produced by the Antigua Forum, which Ed and I previously highlighted here . The IEA blog post provides a nice summary of the Guatemala experience, one of the most market-liberal telecom reforms in the world. Worry not, I will not be changing my regular blogging affiliations. Of course the IEA website is…
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In his famous 1979 lecture, “Politics Without Romance,” James M. Buchanan briefly summarizes public choice theory and some of its implications. He puts special emphasis on viewing government as made up of individuals who respond to incentives in the decisions they make. This is contrary to the naive view of government that was implicitly assumed before public choice came along. That naive view would go something like this: 1. identify a market failure (defined as…
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