Tracing consequences both seen and unseen.
Eric D. DixonShout Out to Cafe Hayek
Posted at 2:27 am on April 1, 2010, by Eric D. Dixon

The venerable Don Boudreaux linked to us from Cafe Hayek yesterday, calling us a “Great new blog” — a tremendous honor for our fledgling effort. Justin floated the idea for starting this blog only 10 days ago, I built the site later that night, and we started asking a bunch of our libertarian friends to join us over the next few days. I’m a little stunned we went in only nine days from tentative mental glimmer to getting name-checked by the chairman of the George Mason University Department of Economics, but the Internet is a pretty fantastic and fast-moving place.

I had the good fortune to meet Boudreaux once, back in 2002, when he shared a Future of Freedom Foundation bill with Nathaniel Branden, the night before the Cato Institute’s 25th anniversary celebration. I sat next to Bumper Hornberger during the dinner, and he couldn’t have been nicer or more enthusiastic about spreading the ideas of liberty. At any rate, Boudreaux gave a speech pointing out the many ways that capitalism makes our lives better, safer, cleaner, and more pleasant — often in ways we take for granted because they’ve become so commonplace. It was essentially a lengthier version of this Cafe Hayek blog entry. It’s a theme that bears repeating often, such as in my blog entry from last night — or, as one of our commenters reminded me, in this Louis CK appearance on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien.”

Back during the early ’00s when I lived and worked for about six years in the DC area (at U.S. Term Limits and Americans for Limited Government), I kept telling people that I planned to pursue an economics degree at George Mason. I even relocated from Maryland to Virginia in a blatant in-state tuition rent-seeking move. But then I got laid off from my job in the then-rapidly-contracting nonprofit world and my mom’s health took a turn for the worse — so I moved back out west, and eventually ended up in St. Louis where I live today.

I often keenly regret not having taken the GMU plunge, though. If you’re a free-market econ geek, GMU’s program seems like one of the most exciting places on earth. To this day, I sometimes idly fantasize about applying, dropping everything, and moving to Fairfax. But grad school is really something I should’ve done a decade ago.

I guess I don’t have a unifying point to all of this rambling, other than to say that Cafe Hayek is excellent, and anybody who happens to be reading our blog but doesn’t yet follow theirs regularly should rectify that today.


Filed under: Blog, Economic Theory, Higher Education
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Henry Hazlitt"[T]he whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups."
Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson
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