Archive for Andrew P. Morriss

Andrew Morriss listens to Elvis’s music in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where he is the D. Paul Jones Jr. & Charlene A. Jones Chairholder in Law and professor of business at the University of Alabama..

Going to Graceland

A recent trip to Memphis took me to Elvis Presley’s famed home, Graceland. Touring Presley’s mansion and its grounds is fascinating for fans of his music, and the Presley estate has done a marvelous job in capturing his music and life. But visiting Graceland mostly interested me as an economist. Walking through the home of [...]

4Jan2012 | Andrew P. Morriss | 9 comments | Continued

What’s So Bad about Eco-Propaganda for Kids?

Although my own children have long outgrown picture books, I still have nephews and nieces young enough to enjoy them. So I buy them from time to time. I also buy books on energy. Perhaps it was that combination that prompted Amazon to recommend What’s So Bad About Gasoline? by Anne Rockwell, engagingly illustrated by [...]

22Sep2010 | Andrew P. Morriss | 23 comments | Continued

The Green-Economy Mirage

If you got an email offering you the chance to invest in a business that would create new profitable industries, employ millions of people, reduce energy consumption without reducing quality of life, and improve environmental quality, would you be skeptical? And if the email went on to claim that the technologies to do all this [...]

5Jan2010 | Andrew P. Morriss | 15 comments | Continued

The Rise and Fall of Curaçao’s Offshore Financial Sector

A longer examination, with footnotes, of Curaçao’s rise and fall, “Change, Dependency, and Regime Plasticity in Offshore Financial Intermediation: The Saga of the Netherlands Antilles,” by Craig M. Boise and Andrew P. Morriss, is forthcoming in the Texas International Law Journal and is available on SSRN. In the late 1970s virtually every major U.S. corporation [...]

23Sep2009 | Andrew P. Morriss | 2 comments | Continued

Freedom Works: The Case of Hong Kong

Hong Kong has an impressive reputation for economic freedom and classical-liberal virtues. In a series of articles, Milton Friedman used Hong Kong to show how the power of free markets combined with little else can create wealth, pointing out that its per-capita income rose from 28 percent of Britain’s in 1960 to 137 percent of [...]

1Nov2008 | Andrew P. Morriss | 6 comments | Continued

Putting a Bureaucrat in Your Tank: Gasoline Markets and Regulation

If you run a barrel of crude oil through a still, the technique used by the earliest refineries and still a stage in modern refining, it separates into various fractions, including kerosene, gasoline, diesel, fuel oils, waxes, and asphalt. Without further processing, about 10 percent will be “straight run” gasoline. In the 1870s this 10 [...]

1Oct2007 | Andrew P. Morriss | 0 comments | Continued

Miners, Vigilantes, and Cattlemen: Property Rights on the Western Frontier

As Americans moved west over the course of the nineteenth century, the property-rights institutions they brought with them from the east evolved to meet the demands of the new conditions. The western frontier experience both changed and strengthened those institutions. The story of property rights on the frontier is captured by the experiences of three [...]

1Apr2007 | Andrew P. Morriss | 5 comments | Continued

The Economics of Property Rights

Property rights play a critical role in a wide range of economic institutions. From understanding why owners are generally better stewards of property than renters to finding ways to resolve environmental problems, property rights are at the center of the analysis. It is unsurprising, therefore, that economics offers important insights into property rights. The economic [...]

1Mar2007 | Andrew P. Morriss | 21 comments | Continued

Europe Meets America: Property Rights in the New World

When Europeans arrived in the Americas and began to claim the rich lands they encountered, they brought with them an equally rich European tradition of property law and justifications for establishing property rights. Today these are often mistakenly lumped together into the law of conquest, sometimes in an attempt to cast modern titles into doubt [...]

1Jan2007 | Andrew P. Morriss | 2 comments | Continued

Why Classical Liberals Care about the Rule of Law (And Hardly Anyone Else Does)

In 1776 John Adams declared that America was “a
nation of laws, not men.” Politicians of all persuasions
have used Adams’s phrase ever since to claim
the moral high ground. Such rare agreement among the
political classes, even if only rhetorical, is an indication
of the power of the idea of the rule of law.

1Nov2005 | Andrew P. Morriss | 2 comments | Continued

Offshore Prosperity

Quick—without reading the next paragraph of this article, name the five largest financial centers in the world. Answers: London,Tokyo, New York, Hong Kong, and the Cayman Islands. New York is the financial capital of one of the largest and wealthiest nations in the world; London, the former capital of a globe-spanning empire and still the [...]

1Sep2005 | Andrew P. Morriss | 4 comments | Continued

Law and Good Intentions

Americans, not just classical-liberal ones, have an almost instinctual distrust of government. Our nation began in a revolt inspired partly by the “Intolerable Acts” of King George III and taxation without representation. The Declaration of Independence recited a lengthy list of grievances against the British government, summarized as “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, [...]

1Jun2005 | Andrew P. Morriss | 2 comments | Continued

Borders and Liberty

Borders play a critical role in our lives. Some of the borders that matter to us are ones we establish ourselves: this is my house and property; that is your house and property. By choosing what is mine and using the legal system to mark it off from what is yours, I create a border. [...]

1Jul2004 | Andrew P. Morriss | 11 comments | Continued

Westerns and Property Rights

Several new westerns opened at the box office last fall, including Kevin Costner’s Open Range, costarring Robert Duvall. The story was a familiar one, with a twist: Costner’s Charlie Waite and Duvall’s “Boss” Spearman are cowboys trailing a herd north through Montana Territory. They run afoul of a villainous cattle rancher who tries to deny [...]

1Mar2004 | Andrew P. Morriss | 3 comments | Continued

Selling History with Dolls

Many people think that markets can’t provide culture. History, for example, has to be supported through government-funded schools, endowments, and grants. In this view, markets can only destroy history: shopping-mall developers want to build on historic battlefields; priceless historic items wind up on eBay selling to collectors with piles of money but too little taste [...]

1May2003 | Andrew P. Morriss | 1 comment | Continued

Fair Is Fair

Several years ago, just after Congress had finally killed the federal mohair subsidy, I interviewed a lobbyist for the Texas Sheep and Goat Raisers Association. He told me he was confident Congress would restore the program in the next session. Why? Because it wasn’t fair that other agricultural interests had subsidies and the goat ranchers [...]

1Oct2001 | Andrew P. Morriss | 0 comments | Continued

A Phone of Our Own: The Deaf Insurrection Against Ma Bell by Harry G. Lang

Gallaudet University Press · 2000 · 242 pages · $29.95 Reviewed by Andrew P. Morriss In A Phone of Our Own, Professor Harry Lang (National Technical Institute for the Deaf) provides an accessible, thoroughly researched history of the development of the TTY (teletype) system used by the hearing-impaired to communicate over telephone lines. Relying on [...]

1Aug2001 | Andrew P. Morriss | 0 comments | Continued
Older Entries

    • © Copyright 2011 Freeman - Ideas on Liberty. All rights reserved.

    43 queries. 2.692 seconds