Sunday Link Archipelago

Enjoy!

• Some Economics of Advocacy and Government Competition – Second Prize in the Student Division of the 2010 Templeton Essay Contest, for an essay which “argues that argumentation to promote policies which reduce government waste is futile as a conduit for actual change…This essay will discuss the failure of advocacy, but also how waste might yet be minimized by competition between governments, achieved by decentralization. Since such a process also depends on citizen preferences, it seems a distant prospect. However, advances in technology may enable man to reach new frontiers whose governments can compete with extant ones.”
• Saving government failure theory from itself: recasting political economy from an Austrian perspective by Peter J. Boettke, Christopher J. Coyne, Peter T. Leeson.  2007 paper where “We develop an alternative model of political economy grounded in the Austrian conception of the dynamic market process…Political actors are structurally ignorant of the knowledge of comparative costs and the relative prices thatwould guide the production and provision of public goods and services in an economically efficient direction.”
• Paul Romer is making his TED presentation available en Español.  Seems to add some credence to the Honduran legislation which just passed, potentially enabling charter cities.  If only there was a conference about free cities coming up in Honduras…