Would Hayek Have Supported a Carbon Tax? A Rejoinder to Robert Murphy

 On April 12, I posted "Hayek on Carbon Taxes: Prices Without Markets or Markets Without Prices?" both on this site and that of the Niskanen Center. On May 30, Robert P. Murphy posted a response on the Institute for Energy Research. I submitted a rejoinder as a comment, but some readers of the IER site have not been able to view it, so here is my rejoinder in full.

(1) With regard to “hijacking the legacies of deceased libertarians”: I would have thought that it would be obvious to any reader that to say, “Hayek would have supported a carbon tax,” is simply a rhetorical device that means “Hayek’s works contain arguments that bear directly on this issue.” I said that explicitly in the first sentence of my post. There is no hijacking going on here.

Economic vs. Personal Feedom in Singapore

Today’s New York Times carries an op-ed by Singaporean novelist Balli Kaur Jaswal on censorship in her home country. It begins by describing the deletion of scenes from American TV shows that feature taboo subjects like vibrators and nonbinary gender identification. It continues with a tongue-in-cheek account of her efforts, together with high-school friends, to figure out just what “sex” was by raiding their mothers’ stashes of contraband women’s magazines. But the real point of the op-ed is a serious one: In Singapore, freedom of information is spotty, at best.

The story sent me running to one of my favorite data troves: The rich collection of statistics on economic and personal freedom put out by the Cato Institute’s Freedom of the World project. Singapore is famous for its economic freedom. On the Cato economic freedom scale, it earns a score of 8.71 out of a possible 10, second only to Hong Kong’s 9.03. The high rating is helped along by sound money, free trade, and a small government, along with perfect 10s in areas like freedom to dismiss workers, freedom from minimum wage requirements, and freedom to practice your chosen profession without a license. These economic freedoms pay off in terms of prosperity. Singapore’s GDP per capita is third in the world, after Qatar and Luxembourg.

When it comes to personal freedom, though, it’s another story. On Cato’s personal freedom index, Singapore ranks seventy-seventh out of 159 countries, a little better than Cambodia or India, but not as free as Turkey or Papua New Guinea. What’s the problem?