What is freedom ?

2007

The aim of this paper is to argue in favor of theoretically well-founded empirical examinations on how economic freedom affects economic performance, which is not the case, as we argue, in most of the huge empirical literature developed after the construction of various indexes of economic freedom. In this spirit we develop a concept of economic freedom based on Hayek (1960): absence of coercion except for state coercion to enforce known general rules. Trying to formulate Hayek's ideas on a less abstract level, as a step further we propose a categorization of government actions, which gives us some guidance about which government actions hurt and which do not hurt economic freedom. Our concept of economic freedom allows us to conceptualize the measurement of economic freedom in a different way from the indexes of economic freedom.

THEOLOGIA, 2022

This article was originally written in Greek and it has been published as part of a three-volume symposium on the concept of freedom in various scientific disciplines, in THEOLOGIA 93, 3 (2022), pp. 261-308, the scholarly journal of the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece. The present translation of the full text in English was done by the author. In the process, a few references were changed from Greek to English ones.

El Diluvio Universal, Vol. II (Bubok), 2016

In this essay I propose to briefly analyze the meaning and consequences of a free-market economy and its corresponding political bodies, a much controversial and often misunderstood approach to political economy.

1998

When I attended graduate school in economics at Yale, one of my professors, Henry Wallich, in 1960 published a book entitled The Cost of Freedom. This book reflected the conventional wisdom of the time that appeared also in the leading textbooks in economics: to achieve lower unemployment, higher economic growth and a more equitable distribution of income, governments have to

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the development of a theory of economic freedom. In this endeavor, we build our framework on the Hayekian notion of freedom (Hayek, 1960) because it explicitly embodies the obvious link between freedom and the state: freedom is an absence of state coercion except for that which enforces abstract, general rules known beforehand. We derive two propositions from this Hayekian thesis and elaborate on them, leading to a categorization of government actions from the viewpoint of economic freedom in which the criterion against which coercive governmental actions must be evaluated is the rule of law, meaning a government’s reliance on general, abstract rules. As an implication, our framework allows us to argue for the imperative differentiation between “efficiency” and “economic freedom” as two separate criteria against which government actions can and must be evaluated. We also show that our framework may help explain the process through which economic freedom enhances growth.

In this paper, we develop a conceptual framework for an understanding of economic freedom based on Hayek (1960), and, as a step further we propose a categorization of government actions, which allows us to conceptualize the measurement of economic freedom in a different way from that of the indexes of economic freedom. This method of proceeding, that is “theoretical framework first, and measurement after, if possible” differs from the one adopted by those who have constructed the indexes of economic freedom. An advantage of our concept of economic freedom is that it is compatible with a theory of growth, and this being so, it provides additional insights to a better understanding of how economic freedom leads to growth.

European Journal of Political Economy, 2003

Since 1996, the Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) reports have presented an index that measures the consistency of a nation's policies and institutions with economic freedom. The key ingredients of economic freedom are personal choice, voluntary exchange, freedom to compete, and protection of person and property. Earlier versions of the EFW index have been based almost exclusively on objective quantifiable data. However, some important elements of economic freedom, particularly those dealing with property rights and regulatory restraints, are difficult to capture with objective measures. This paper integrates survey data on legal structure and government regulation into the EFW index and uses it to develop a more comprehensive measure of economic freedom. D

The market is traditionally hailed as the very exemplar of a system under which people enjoy freedom, in particular the negative sort of freedom associated with liberal and libertarian thought: freedom as noninterference. But how does the market appear from the perspective of a rival conception of freedom (freedom as non-domination) that is linked with the Roman and neo-Roman tradition of republicanism? The republican conception of freedom argues for important normative constraints on property, exchange, and regulation, without supporting extremes to the effect that 'property is theft' or 'taxation is theft' or anything of that kind. It does not cast a cold eye on commerce; it merely provides an alternative view of the attractions.