Meanderings of an Eccentric Economist

Meanderings of an Eccentric Economist

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February 2026

Why Does Venmo Make Payments Public?
How social payments replaced institutional trust with visibility.
 • Tarnell Brown
Replication Notes: Tariffs, Time, and Constitutional Incentives
Mapping the time horizon of tariff authority, economic costs, and institutional review
 • Tarnell Brown
Don’t Put Your Faith in Princes — But Do Notice When the Right Ones Win
Hernando de Soto and Liberalism Beyond Strongmen
 • Tarnell Brown
When Correction Looks Like Failure
Institutional Learning and the Paradox of Democratic Responsiveness
 • Tarnell Brown
McArdle’s Libertarian “Polemic” Was Really a Mechanism Failure
How a paleolibertarian takeover turned a liberal party into a political vehicle
 • Tarnell Brown
The Myth That Won’t Die
What Heritage’s own fraud database reveals about incentives, institutions, and the persistence of a political myth
 • Tarnell Brown
Babel Is a Coordination Problem
Language drift is normal. The incentives we’ve built around it aren’t.
 • Tarnell Brown
The Tariff Trilemma: Protection, Prices, and Prosperity
Why politicians promise a free lunch on tariffs—and why scarcity always collects.
 • Tarnell Brown
When Resistance Reveals Institutional Failure: A Response to The Bulwark on Immigration Enforcement
The people of Minneapolis aren't leading—they're screaming that our enforcement mechanisms are fundamentally broken
 • Tarnell Brown
The Punishment Equilibrium
How courts, jails, and housing providers get trapped in the safest deadly choice
 • Tarnell Brown
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