A Socialist?

Diary Entry: January 29, 2025

I’m starting to feel like I’m in a detective novel. Since the library and my professor were dead ends, I’ve just been falling down a YouTube rabbit hole, watching old lectures and interviews about Coase.

I just watched a video of Guido Calabresi — the “Cathedral” guy — talking to a group of students. And he just casually mentioned... that Coase was a socialist when he started out. That he even wrote some “socialist paper.”

I had to rewind the video. A socialist? Ronald Coase? The guy everyone holds up as the champion of the free market and libertarianism? The hero of the Chicago School?

This is absolutely crazy.

This changes the entire narrative. Everyone talks about him like he was born a free-market ideologue. If he started as a socialist, what does that mean? Did he really abandon those ideas, or did he just hide them?

Things are getting more and more interesting. Who is this Coase guy anyway??