“A defense of liberal institutions is needed now more than ever, and Julian Simon’s work, and the work of the previous winners of the Simon Award, will be crucial in providing it.”
“… for population growth to get translated into economic progress we need liberal institutions.”
Ed. Note: This completes a three-part series on the views of the late Steve Horwitz (1964–2021), the first two being on the climate debate and a carbon tax.
Since 2001, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, along with the Simon family, has presented an annual Julian Simon Award. The first award winner was Stephen Moore, a former research fellow for Dr. Simon (1982–85) who has promoted the Simon worldview ever since.
The most recent award winner was Stephen Horwitz, whose comments follow below.
Fellow professor and classical liberal Peter Boettke shared Horwitz’s remarks below on social media with the comment:
… Continue ReadingI do think in the interview so much of what was truly wonderful about Steve comes out.
Ed. Note: The late Steven Horwitz addressed the climate-change debate and related policy issues in ways that remain highly pertinent to today’s debate. Yesterday, he argued that social science, not only physical science, was crucial for public policy. Today, Horwitz’s views on the carbon dioxide (CO2) tax are revisited.
“First, finding the right tax/fee/price is not a simple thing…. Bureaucratically set prices or fees do not have the same powerful incentives for careful behavior, nor will they ever capture as much knowledge, as do real market prices. Given that, political battles over those taxes and fees are inevitable, and with such battles out goes any semblance of economic rationality.”
To say that he was a quick study was an understatement. The late Steve Horwitz imparted a lot of common sense to a lot of areas, including the climate change and carbon tax debates.…
Continue ReadingEd. Note: Classical liberalism lost a prominent expositor with the death of Steve Horwitz (1964–2021). His 2012 piece below argues that physical science is only the beginning to determine climate policy. Nine years later, the public-policy debate is going Horwitz’s way with a greater appreciation of both analytical failure and government failure relative to “market failure,” pointing toward adaptation to weather/climate change, not activist mitigation of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. (Part II tomorrow examines Horwitz’s Austrian-school takedown of a carbon (CO2) tax.
“In fact, those who think they can go directly from science to policy are, as it turns out, engaged in denial – denial of the relevance of social science.”
Good analysis survives the test of time–and should be periodically revisited as such. Stephen Horwitz’s Global Warming Is about Social Science Too: Who’s in denial?…
Continue Reading