Abstract This paper investigates efficiency and freedom as joint foundations of market economies. Whereas ideal perfect competition accommodates Mill’s principle individual liberty in the economic arena, real world, imperfectly competitive, markets appear often conflicting values. Building on J. S. utilitarian defense free trade On Liberty Chapter V, this puts forward a consequentialist under i...

Boston was a laudable location for the 141st Annual APHA conference in November 2013. The city after all was the ‘birthplace’ of the United States of America with the American Revolutionary War (War of Independence) being ignited there in 1775. Throughout history Boston has contributed admirably to the American public health movement. Pre Revolutionary War, Bostonians became masters of politica...

An agent’s responsibility for action has critical importance in both criminal and civil law. In a liberal society that favors negative liberty, the law permits maximum liberty and autonomy only to responsible agents.1 Generally unencumbered by legal regulation, they are free, for example, to make foolish, irrational and even dangerous life choices, such as refusing potentially life-saving medic...

Until the twentieth century, economics and politics were studied together under the heading of political economy. Two major nineteenth-century treatises on the subject, by David Ricardo (1817) and John Stuart Mill (1848), had the title Principles of Political Economy. Toward the end of that century, the subdisciplines separated; the turning point might be marked by the publication of Alfred Mar...