Ep. 488 Welfare Economics: Rothbard Was Right
The Tom Woods Show
Tom Woods
4.8 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 11 September 2015
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
One of the areas of economics to which Murray Rothbard contributed significantly is known as welfare economics. As we explain in this episode, it deals with how we can determine whether utility (individual or "social," properly understood) has been increased. Rothbard's analysis led him to the conclusion that it was impossible for state action to increase social utility.
Free-market economist Bryan Caplan, in his famous article on why he isn't an Austrian, argues that Rothbard's solution is riddled with problems. Jeff Herbener joins me for a robust defense of Rothbard.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Tom Woods Show, episode 488. |
| 0:03.4 | Prepare to set fire to the index card of allowable opinion. |
| 0:08.1 | Your daily dose of liberty education starts here, the Tom Woods Show. |
| 0:14.3 | Hey, everybody, if you've been meeting to start that blog or website, but you don't know what your first steps are, |
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| 0:27.5 | you how to get a blog up and running in just five minutes. Plus, if you check out tomwoods.com |
| 0:33.6 | slash publicity before starting up that blog, I'll give you some free publicity right out of the gate. |
| 0:39.5 | So check it all out, the free e-book, the video tutorial, and the publicity offer at tomwoods.com |
| 0:45.0 | slash publicity. |
| 0:46.4 | Hey, everybody, Tom Woods here. |
| 0:47.9 | I'm on my way to Houston for Liberty Fest Houston this weekend, September 11th and 12th, 2015, so I expect to see you good |
| 0:56.7 | Houstonians there. But, of course, there is an episode for you anyway. And today we're going to |
| 1:02.8 | talk about a field of economics. Some of you may be unfamiliar with. It's called welfare |
| 1:07.7 | economics, and it has to do not with welfare payments, of course, but with making people better off. How can we be sure that people are made better off in some transaction? And we're going to see what Murray Rothbard had to say about that. And we're going to see what Brian Kaplan had to say about what Murray Rothbart had to say about that. |
| 1:35.0 | Brian Kaplan is a guest of this show who's been on in the past, but who wrote a famous article called Why I Am Not an Austrian economist. |
| 1:37.5 | And little by little, we've been working our way through that article. |
| 1:46.9 | And on today's show notes page, tomwoods.com slash 488, I will link you to under the related episode section, the two episodes we've done so far in which we've taken on some of what Kaplan has to say and try to answer it from a |
| 1:52.2 | traditional Austrian perspective. Joining me today to help us get a grip on this welfare |
| 1:57.4 | economic subject, which is very important, by the way. As you'll see, this really is |
| 2:01.4 | a key question. How can we know if people have been made better off? Of course, Rothbard, |
| 2:06.8 | in his analysis, comes to the conclusion that we can never say that state action makes somebody |
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