I will be guest blogging at MarginalRevolution next week.
While Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen are in India next week expanding the reach of MRUniversity, they have invited me to guest blog on MarginalRevolution.com. Starting next Monday (December 17) I will blog for seven days on topics broadly related to Madmen and PoliticalEntrepreneurs.com.
I can’t think of a more fitting place than MR for Wayne and I to be introducing our ideas. Notice their tagline, “Small steps toward a much better world.” What Alex and Tyler have been doing every day for all these years is competing in the marketplace of ideas, and their tagline says that they’re consciously doing so in order to improve the human condition.
This reflects a major theme in Madmen: that the free flow of ideas is an essential input into beneficial political change. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said:
When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. (Abrams v. United States 250 US 616 [1919] at 630)
This is a very old argument, of course. John Milton made it in 1644 when his Areopagitica advocated freedom of expression. “Let [Truth] and Falsehood grapple,” he said. “whoever knew Truth to be put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?” This same theme can be found re-occurring anywhere from Socrates, to John Stuart Mill, to Thomas Jefferson — and now in Madmen as the argument applies to political change.
So I’ll continue competing next week on MarginalRevolution, and I hope to see you there!