One example: the reduction in medical research would cause mortality to rise. It’s not at all clear that a salesman who lives in a more leisurely world but whose child dies of pneumonia would be just as happy as a hard-driving salesman living in today’s world in which physicians, researchers, and profit-grubbing pharma executives – motivated by personal ambition – stress themselves out and work long hours to supply the medical care that relieves parents of the constant worry that diseases such as pneumonia and influenza will kill their kids. Likewise for many other features of our daily lives that we take for granted but that we enjoy only because of the ambitious striving that capitalist incentives promote – features whose disappearance from our lives would make us most unhappy.

Should we sacrifice the well-being of our children for the well-being of our parents? Or the other way around? Tough call.

But good economics isn’t about what feels right. It is often, if not usually, the job of good economists to explain why it is that something which feels right is actually quite wrong. For example, mandating that a certain vital good, like oil or healthcare, be sold at a low price (a price control), often feels like the right thing to do. But economists almost universally recognize that price controls have punishing and negative effects including unnecessary shortages, rationing, wait lists and the emergence of black markets as we’ve seen during the 1970s oil crisis and socialized healthcare systems. Economics isn’t an emotional nor a morality play. It’s not about what feels right. It’s about how people respond to incentives and use information.

This is economic illiteracy in spades. The fact is that every single dollar of interest we pay on the national debt comes right back to the pockets of American taxpayers. If you don’t understand that, then you’re not thinking clearly about the national debt. Suppose the government owes $100 and pays $3 a year in interest. The alternative to paying that interest is to raise current taxes by $100 and pay down the debt. If you do that, taxpayers are going to have $100 less in assets, and will therefore earn less interest on their savings. That costs them (roughly) the same $3 a year. In other words, the damage was done back when the government spent that $100 in the first place. (Of course, if the $100 was spent wisely, the damage might have been worth doing. Or not.) Once that $100 has been spent, the taxpayers are out $3 a year forever regardless of whether the debt is ever paid off.

But I think that it’s worth re-emphasizing that (1) libertarians defend the moral priority of voluntary transactions—and that market transactions are just one example of these, and (2) being in favor of markets does not mean that one favors everything that businesses engage in to enhance their profitability.

I am continually astounded by the many missed opportunities you Humans have to learn valuable life lessons. Perplexingly, you manage to not only miss the causes of major events, but to draw the wrong lesson from your experiences. It is curious to me how such an oft clever species can frequently be so dense.

Everyone seems to agree that progressives care about social justice, and the conversation has so far been about the different ways in which libertarians, too, care about social justice. But there are some dissonances. Take school vouchers. What social justice argument can anyone give against school vouchers? My colleagues at the law school invoke the Establishment clause, the separation of church and state. But that is not a social justice argument. Why can’t the Establishment clause be balanced against the imperative to help the poor? If their paramount value were social justice they should support vouchers. Yet the vehemence with which progressives oppose vouchers makes me suspicious that there is something else animating their view: not social justice, but support for big government, for strong unions, and the like. Am I being unfair?

Every generation has an incentive to push costs of current spending onto future generations. But no generation has done it as freely as this one. Maybe people in the past had a visceral sense of themselves as a small piece of a larger chain across the centuries. As a result, it felt viscerally wrong to privilege the current generation over the future ones, in a way it no longer does.

Even if it were possible that incorruptible saints could somehow “run” a country better than do the spontaneous forces of the market and of civil society, the fact that highly flawed human beings such as Newt Gingrich (and too many others to name) routinely rise to positions of great authority in government should cause you to pause from your incessant campaign to transfer more and more decision-making power from individuals to government.