Alvin Rabushka: Economic Freedom

In his blog “Thoughtful Ideas” (Commentary on Current Political, Economic, and Social Developments in the United States and Around the World) author Alvin Rabushka recently published his thoughts on Economic Freedom …

Economic Freedom, Part 1

In October 1986, with support from the Liberty Fund in Indianapolis, Indiana, the Fraser Institute convened the first of four conferences in Napa Valley, California. The Fraser Institute published the proceedings in 1988, Economic Freedom, Democracy and Welfare. Edited by Michael A. Walker, Director of The Fraser Institute, and co-chaired with Milton and Rose Friedman, the conference was organized as a counterpart to do for economic freedom what Freedom House did for political freedom: to calculate the amount of economic freedom that exists in various nations of the world.

Its origins can be traced to a conversation in 1994 at the Mont Pelerin Meeting in Cambridge, England, between Michael Walker and Milton Friedman, whose book Capitalism and Freedom had been extant since 1962. However, there had been no serious attempt to explore the relationship between economic and political freedom in a scholarly way. That conversation led to the idea of broadening the analysis to also include civil freedoms, which can often be more important than political freedoms …

Read the all three parts of Alvin Rabushka’s blog on Economic Freedom ->

Blog “Thoughtful Ideas”: Economic Freedom, part 1
Economic Freedom, part 2
Economic Freedom, part 3

Alvin Rabushka is an American political scientist. He is a David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and member of the Mont Pelerin Society. He is best known for his work on taxation and transition economies. Together with Robert Hall, he wrote a detailed Flat Tax plan known as the Hall–Rabushka flat tax.