Michael Munger

There are professional occupations perceived as more or less incompatible with virtue in the public’s mind. One of these is entrepreneur. “Virtuous entrepreneur” sounds like an oxymoron. But is it? This chapter answers this question in the negative. It distinguishes between seeking legitimate profits by engaging in voluntary exchanges and seeking undeserved profits through such means as government lobbying or what economists have dubbed “rent-seeking.” While the latter entrepreneur, they claim, is unvirtuous, the former is not. In the final section, drawing on the work of Deirdre McCloskey on the bourgeois virtues, they suggest that different institutions create different sorts of actors: corrupt institutions tend to create non-virtuous entrepreneurs while good institutions create entrepreneurs with entrepreneurial virtues.

A distinction is made between libertarian destinations and libertarian directions. Basic income cannot be part of a truly libertarian state unless it could be accomplished entirely through voluntary donations. But basic income is an important step in a libertarian direction because it improves core values such as self-ownership, liberty and efficiency of transfers while reducing coercion and increasing procedural fairness. Practical approaches to achieving basic income are compared to proposals by Milton Friedman and Charles Murray.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the world's oldest known literary works, originating in ancient Mesopotamia around 2100 BCE. It tells the story of Gilgamesh, the powerful but arrogant king of Uruk, and his journey of self-discovery. Initially, his tyranny drives his people to seek divine intervention, leading to the creation of Enkidu, a wild man who becomes Gilgamesh’s friend and equal. Together, they embark on heroic adventures, including slaying the monster Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven. Their defiance angers the gods, resulting in Enkidu's death. Stricken with grief, Gilgamesh embarks on a quest for immortality, seeking wisdom from Utnapishtim, a man granted eternal life after surviving a great flood. Ultimately, Gilgamesh learns that immortality is unattainable for mortals and that his legacy lies in the enduring achievements of his reign. The epic explores themes of friendship, mortality, and the human desire for meaning.

What is social justice? At this point, there is considerable disagreement. For many, the term social justice is baffling and useless, with no real meaning. Most who use it argue that social justice is the moral fairness of the system of rules and norms that govern society. Do these rules work so that all persons get what is due to them as human beings and as members of the community? Shifting from the will of individuals in rendering justice to the outcome of the system of rules in achieving justice can be a dangerous leap. To some, it suggests that virtually every inequality arises because the rules of the game are unfair and that the state must intervene whenever there are unequal outcomes. The dangers of this leap are the primary focus of Is Social Justice Just?, whose twenty-one authors accepted an invitation to "explore, reassess, and critique the concept of social justice-relating it to ongoing debates in economics, history, philosophy, politics, public policy, religion, and the broader culture."

ABSTRACT Self-Interest and Public Interest in Western Politics showed that the public, politicians, and bureaucrats are often public spirited. But this does not invalidate public-choice theory. Public-choice theory is an ideal type, not a claim that self-interest explains all political behavior. Instead, public-choice theory is useful in creating rules and institutions that guard against the worst case, which would be universal self-interestedness in politics. In contrast, the public-interest hypothesis is neither a comprehensive explanation of political behavior nor a sound basis for institutional design.

The arguments for redistribution of wealth, and for prohibiting certain transactions such as price-gouging, both are based in mistaken conceptions of exchange. This paper proposes a neologism, “euvoluntary” exchange, meaning both that the exchange is truly voluntary and that it benefits both parties to the transaction. The argument has two parts: First, all euvoluntary exchanges should be permitted, and there is no justification for redistribution of wealth if disparities result only from euvoluntary exchanges. Second, even exchanges that are not euvoluntary should generally be permitted, because access to market exchange may be the only means by which people in desperate circumstances can improve their position.

One of the key tenets of James Buchanan’s political thought was the centrality of the status quo, embodied in Buchanan’s frequently heard axiom that “we start from where we are.” There is practical political value in “starting from where we are,” because we are in fact there, and not someplace else. Buchanan’s normative concern is that starting from where “we are” means that changes are more likely to be voluntary, and therefore Pareto-improving. The history of this notion of the status quo in contractarian thought is developed briefly, and then a particular example, the Chilean Constitution and its problematic implementation, is discussed.

What is social justice? At this point, there is considerable disagreement. For many, the term social justice is baffling and useless, with no real meaning. Most who use it argue that social justice is the moral fairness of the system of rules and norms that govern society. Do these rules work so that all persons get what is due to them as human beings and as members of the community? Shifting from the will of individuals in rendering justice to the outcome of the system of rules in achieving justice can be a dangerous leap. To some, it suggests that virtually every inequality arises because the rules of the game are unfair and that the state must intervene whenever there are unequal outcomes. The dangers of this leap are the primary focus of Is Social Justice Just?, whose twenty-one authors accepted an invitation to "explore, reassess, and critique the concept of social justice-relating it to ongoing debates in economics, history, philosophy, politics, public policy, religion, and the broader culture."

:Our theoretical claim is that racism was consciously devised, and later evolved, to serve two conflicting purposes. First, racism served a legal-economic purpose, legitimating ownership and savage treatment of slaves by southern whites, preserving the value of property rights in labor. Second, racism allowed slave owners to justify, to themselves and to outsiders, how a morally "good" person could own slaves. Racism portrayed African slaves as being less than human, or else as being other than human. The interest of the historical narrative presented here is the emergence of racial chattel slavery as a coherent and fiercely defended ideal, rather than the "necessary evil" that had been the perspective of the Founders. The reason that this is important is that the ideology of racism persisted far beyond the destruction of the institution of slavery, through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and in some ways persisting even today. This work is an example of the problems of assuming that there is a "feedback" mechanism by which moral intuitions are updated and perfected; to the contrary, as suggested by Douglass North, even socially inferior ideologies can prove extremely persistent.