Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and the Origins of the Administrative State

Adam Mossoff discusses The Role of Intellectual Property in a Thriving Innovation Economy, September 27, 2017

On March 6, 2017, Dr. Loren Lomasky of the University of Virginia gave a lecture on the ethics and economics of inter-generational transfer programs. Professor Lomasky predicts that as people live longer, and fertility rates decline in the West, public debt will rise and existing workers will pay an increasing amount to finance transfer programs. According to the Lomasky and Brennan thesis, transfer programs are easy to pass and hard to cut because it is cheap for people to vote for such programs, even if the consequences include increased debt spending by governments and reduced economic growth and job opportunities for the young.

On September 19, 2016 Professor Jason Brennan of Georgetown University visited Duke University to give a Hayek Lecture. Professor Brennan began with an overview of “anti-commodification” arguments from philosophers like Michael Sandel and Elizabeth Anderson. He distinguished several different ways they criticize markets, include market exchange leading to a misallocation of resources, harm to others, or harm to the participants themselves. He put aside these arguments as legitimate worries, and focused on symbolic objections to markets, which argue that the exchange of some things – like money for sex – is wrong because it signals disrespect to some of the participants, or because it changes the meaning of the same action when money is not involved. Brennan disagrees, arguing that the meaning of any exchange is a socially constructed fact, so that there’s nothing timelessly true about an exchange sending bad signals rather than good signals. If the norms that create the meaning of an exchange produce net harms rather than net benefits, Brennan argues, we have reasons to try to change the norms rather than submit to them. A case in point is kidneys. Many people in the world die waiting for kidney donations that never come. Brennan concludes that rather than deferring to the common view that it’s wrong to exchange money for kidneys, we should criticize the norms that suggest there is something inherently wrong with trading kidneys for cash.

In this lecture, Professor Matt Zwolinski discusses how price-gougers and sweatshop owners may benefit consumers and workers, even when the benefits they bestow would be described as "exploitation" by some observers. Zwolinski briefly discusses how and under what conditions these relationships can be mutually beneficial, and then asks why so many people think that price-gougers and sweatshop owners who provide opportunities to the poor that would otherwise be unavailable are worse than people who do nothing at all to help the poor. Zwolinski argues that our intuitions about these cases are misleading, and that we should revise them if we discover that people who protest sweatshops and price-gouging make the poor worse off than they would be without them.