Spread Economic Welfare not Democracy

I particularly liked Getting It Right by Robert Barro and his libertarian views. I throughly enjoyed the topics he addressed in his "Power of Economic" reasoning section. The belief in the importance of property rights, a free market economy and little government intervention drove all of these libertarian stances in his last section. In particular, I liked his discussion on Second-Hand Smoke and whether or not the government should intervene and restrict the use of cigarettes. Although he doesn't appreciate second-hand smoke, he still does not see good results coming out of restrictions on smoking. I think this is interesting given that he wrote this well before many states went smoke-free in public places. It hasn't proven to be too much of a problem and has probably made the majority of people better off.

His discussion of property rights, however, brings us back full circle to Professor Hurley's class when we first discussed Locke and Rousseau. Locke and Rousseau had strong arguments for property rights and how they were to be determined in the state of nature. They argued that man obtains property rights through the labor done onto the property with the reasoning that if a man owns himself, he then also ons his labor, therefore he owns the property upon which he exerts this labor. As a result of these arguments, property rights have become an important part of political and economic thought which drives peoples' views and policies. Property rights are important in Barro's view because it gives people something they can claim to be theirs and not have taken advantage of by others (or a government). That being said, he strongly encourages developing nations to not adopt democracy, but rather, adopt economic ideas based on property rights a free market in order for it to shape into a democracy. I thought this was particularly interesting due to the fact that the U.S. likes to "spread democracy to the world." Instead, we should spread our economic principles and contribute to the economic welfare of these countries to help them grow first. This, then, will then help the countries develop into a democracy. I thought this view was discussed very well by Barro.

Lastly, I liked Hillary's post on the NCAA being a monopoly...I could tell she was a bit heated. I thought this part of his book was a bit much too.