The Economics of Law, Order, and Action

My book "The Economics of Law, Order, and Action: The Logic of Public Goods" is now available for purchase. Its primary purpose is to provide a comprehensive challenge to the standard position of the economic and political mainstream, according to which efficient production of so-called public goods, including law and defense, requires the use of territorial monopolies of coercive force.

In other words, in an attempt to draw on the interdisciplinary spirit of classical political economy, it aims at providing a wide-ranging economic and ethical case for extending the applicability of voluntary, entrepreneurial cooperation to the realm of creating and sustaining legal and protective services together with attendant institutional frameworks.

There is No "Third Way" Between Cooperation and Destruction

Just as astronomy is anti-astrology and medicine is anti-quackery, economics is anti-politics: politics destroys peaceful social cooperation and hampers its potential, while economics describes all of its productive nuances and beneficial intricacies; politics promotes social myths that crush the developmental drive of creative human action, while economics dispels those myths by explaining the enriching power of commerce and entrepreneurship; politics stokes artificial divisions and collective hatreds, while economics describes the processes whereby strangers become friends without even being acquaintances.

In other words, as a perspective on the world, economics is no more reconcilable with politics than astronomy is reconcilable with astrology or medicine with quackery. There is no "third way" between cooperation and destruction, production and plunder, or education and propaganda. Every such "third way" turns out to be at best a dead end of stagnation, and at worst a highway to social disintegration, and sound economic knowledge is the most reliable means of avoiding both.