Thursday, September 10, 2020

In Defense of Openness Podcast

The Hayek Program at the Mercatus Center at George Mason recently hosted a forum on In Defense of Openness, with Anna Stilz, Kit Wellman, and James Witte as critics/discussants.

Here is the podcast.

All of the commentators had interesting things to say, but perhaps of most interest to our readers is the discussion with Stilz. Van der Vossen and I see Stilz's kind of view as a right-wing position which immiserates and violates the rights of the global poor in a misguided attempt to protect the wages of the relatively rich, but Stilz--in part based on her rejection of the relevant economic literature--sees us as pushing an unmotivated rights-based theory which would greatly harm the domestic "poor" for widely dispersed but on average small benefits to everyone else. 

See my post here for a more of a response to her claim that there is not much presumption against interference.