NPR: Judge No Longer A Believer In Unfettered Markets (Reagan appointee)

All Things Considered, May 9, 2009 · Richard Posner is one of the most cited legal scholars in America. He's a federal judge, and he's cranked out a new book almost every year for the past 40 years, writing about everything from sex to Kafka to, of course, the law.

Posner is also one of the country's leading libertarian thinkers. He and his compatriots at the University of Chicago put their trust in free, unfettered and barely regulated markets.

But the title of Posner's new book might tip you off to his recent change of heart: A Failure of Capitalism.

He says better regulation is necessary — because it's our nature to be greedy — and it all boils down to the law of the jungle.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103979139



Read An Excerpt
http://media.npr.org/documents/2009/may/Posner.pdf


"All Things Considered" audio here:
http://www.npr.org/templates/dmg/dmg.php?prgCode=ATC&showDate=09-May-2009&segNum=2&mediaPref=RM

And privatizing roads is a good thing. Etc.

...will have to admit the Reagan Revolution failed us as a nation.

Anyone who argues otherwise is simply married to their position and not rational thought.

Larry Kudlow, I'm looking at you.

SO, econ should/must reexamine its premise of 'the rational businessman.'

Some economists have been moving in that direction but it is not easy. I tested a way of showing how a price can very from its "true" economic value through greater levels of irrationality and imperfect information. I split the two up because I think people can make rational decisions with imperfect information and irrational decisions with perfect information. Together, the two can create wide deviations from an appropriate price.

that there wouldn't be a need for judges under that system because there also wouldn't be a government.

It is hard to imagine how Posner became elevated to being the most influential judge in America considering how laughable so many of his free market fantasies were.

Woody Allen explained the rise of Posner when he said that 80% of success is showing up. Posner relentlessly "showed up" by writing "scholarship" at a volume that was super human. Only thing is, almost all of it is junk.

Here are a few of Posner's "insights" I remember from having to read him:

-Industrial workers should not be allowed to purchase insurance for "catastrophic death and dismemberment" because they will have an incentive to allow their arms to be chopped off in order to collect.

-To solve the problem of a shortage of white babies for adoption and surplus of black babies seeking adoption, we should get rid of the non-profit adoption system and create a market in which babies could be bought and sold.

-In in his most bizarre book, about sex, he argued that prostitutes wear high heels in order to signal subconsciously to men that they cannot run, and because captive women are attractive men, this makes prostitutes more attractive.

I could go on and on. He just made shit up and called it scholarship. You can produce volumes and volumes of articles if all you are doing is sitting in your study making up fantasies and calling them economics.

...has just figured out that the captains of finance and industry are prone to greed, and will manipulate markets accordingly? Does that about cover it?

Wow, what an insight!

Good for him for recognizing it, however belatedly, I guess.