Archive for the ‘Economics’ Category
Quote of the day
Sunday, January 22nd, 2012"People don’t want ‘a better clothes dryer’, they want to be able to spend less time washing clothes and thus more time writing novels or playing with their children or fishing or what have you." —Z. Caceres on the benefits and desirability of economic growth
More of Obama’s green bubble: subsidizing Wall Street to buy Chinese solar panels
Saturday, December 10th, 2011I liked this column by T.J. Rodgers in the Wall Street Journal, Subsidizing Wall Street to Buy Chinese Solar Panels. It explains how American consumers are not the ones who benefit from the Obama administration's subsidies on the purchase of household solar panels. It's a nice, short economics lesson on ...
Guaranteed student debt guarantees the need for student debt
Saturday, October 22nd, 2011The ongoing Occupy movement has produced myriad versions of the "we are the 99%" lament, complaining that 99% of us have been taken advantage of and outright wronged by the richest 1% of individuals who control the financial sector and the governments of our society. I've found myself surprisingly sympathetic ...
Economic prosperity and “going green”
Wednesday, May 11th, 2011The New York Times reports that American consumers no longer want to splurge on environmentally friendly but more expensive products now that their financial outlook isn't so good. But America’s eco-consciousness, it turns out, is fickle. As recession gripped the country, the consumer’s love affair with green products, from recycled toilet ...
40 things Bryan Caplan has learned
Sunday, April 10th, 2011Bryan Caplan wrote a great post for his 40th birthday: 40 Things I Learned in My First 40 Years. Not only is it full of good philosophy and rules of thumb, it has tons of links, none of which I am going to a href for you. In no particular order: Economics 1. ...
Democrats’ same old “raise taxes” crap
Thursday, March 17th, 2011After 8 years of Republican deficits, inflation, cronyism, and war, the liberal Democrats of this country had a nice opportunity to accomplish something worthwhile, or at least stand for something new and different. Their motto was "hope" and "change", and even if we knew their President and their Congress weren't ...
Big government is only possible because of previous free enterprise, not the other way around
Monday, March 14th, 2011Libertarians should be familiar with the position that the mixed-economy socialism much of the Western world lives under is only affordable because previous decades of relative freedom have enabled a level of economic production and a climate of trust, mutual dependability, and competition that produced the wealth that could (relatively ...
Locavores want to have their cake and eat it, too
Thursday, February 24th, 2011I just typed that title and didn't realize until after typing it that it was quite a good pun. A perfect example of no pun intended! This post does have a point. I really liked this post from a blag called The Whited Sepulchre. It rants against "locavores" who want to ...
Government-enforced net neutrality
Tuesday, February 1st, 2011The only part of the phrase "government-enforced net neutrality" that is relevant is the "government-enforced" part. There are so many arguments against the position that the Imperial Federal Government should enforce net neutrality that I had a hard time knowing where to begin. They include: Most problems with cable companies ...
Links for an ending week
Friday, November 5th, 2010The Fraud Started at the Very Top: With Government Leaders, from Washington's Blag. See their numerous examples of how rating agencies, the Treasury Department, the SEC, the Federal Reserve, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and others committed fraud and helped banks commit fraud. This is truly a devastating list of criminality ...
China’s 25-year government-bloat plan
Saturday, October 2nd, 2010According to Thomas Friedman, China is doing moon shots. Yes, that’s plural. When I say “moon shots” I mean big, multibillion-dollar, 25-year-horizon, game-changing investments. China has at least four going now: one is building a network of ultramodern airports; another is building a web of high-speed trains connecting major cities; a ...
Profit is vital to human well-being
Tuesday, September 28th, 2010"Profit is vital to human well-being. Profit is the payment to entrepreneurs just as wages are payments to labor, interest to capital and rent to land. In order to earn profits in free markets, entrepreneurs must identify and satisfy human wants and do so in a way that economizes on ...
Another perspective on small business in the era of Big Government
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010I liked this blag post by Philip Greenspun about how his small business suffers, both in absolute terms and relative to the competition, in the face of more government, more regulations, and more lobbyists. One reason I liked it might be because it fits in with our original goal in ...
Competing currencies being accepted across mid-Michigan
Sunday, July 18th, 2010This story about many people and businesses in Michigan exchanging alternative forms of currency instead of U.S. dollars was pretty interesting. It's from a local news station, so it includes a video of the evening news segment, in addition to some excerpts from the news segment: Right now, you can buy ...
Anthony de Jasay: socialism has made the European worker impotent
Sunday, June 27th, 2010Somehow I came across this article written by Anthony de Jasay for the Library of Economics and Liberty, which I know best as the site that publishes EconLog, the blag of Bryan Caplan, Arnold Kling, and David Henderson. Jasay's article was written in 2006. It details some consequences of socialist ...
The Great Material Continuum
Monday, June 7th, 2010Star Trek presented a notoriously bad conception of economics because of creator Gene Roddenberry's insistence that humans and all other races belonging to the United Federation of Planets would use no money. Science-fiction author Gardner Goldsmith explained why this economic ideal was not only fantasy but would result in material ...
Stupid census commercial
Thursday, February 18th, 2010Have you heard that radio commercial encouraging people to participate in and cooperate with the census because it allows local, state, and federal governments to allocate money for schools and determine how many teachers a town needs and so forth? The narrator says there are four science teachers in this ...
Economics link of the day
Thursday, February 11th, 2010I really liked this article that I found from Reddit: Economics In Four Dimensions. Here are two good passages to entice you: The most complex factor in the study of economics is time. Because liberal and statist economic theory does not properly account for the fourth dimension, it rarely predicts economic ...
Campaign finance reform is pretty simple
Monday, January 25th, 2010Many of my friends and millions of people in the blogosphere/social-mediasphere have expressed their outrage and indignation at the Supreme Court's ruling that corporations can spend as much as they want to promote or oppose whatever political candidates or causes that they want. One of my friends said she was ...
One year of Obama crimes and failures
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010Barack Obama is already a terrible president, a war criminal who belongs in prison beside Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. He is an economic ignoramus who despises private enterprise, exalts the State over the individual, and dreams of a world in which the inert, gray, bureaucratic mediocrity of corporate-State ...
Fish in a barrel 6
Thursday, December 17th, 2009For some combination of reasons, the main one probably being the coming of the Second Great Depression and the need of so many people to save money, the exorbitant price of a college degree is being criticized and questioned more loudly and frequently than I can remember. For instance, Peter ...
The auto bailout money will not be repaid
Tuesday, December 15th, 2009And there will be more of it. Probably multiple times. Until the automotive industry is a de facto arm of the Imperial Federal Government. If you think this is not an explicit goal of the Obama regime, leave your address in the comments so I can mail you a tall, ...
Fish in a barrel 5
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009A Texas jury decided to sentence a murderer to death after consulting their Bibles during deliberation. People who lack a solid grasp of important socio-political issues (Statists) will use this revelation to distract from the real issue. The issue they will harp on is whether this represents some violation of ...
Quote of the day
Sunday, October 18th, 2009"Government has never increased the standard of living of one single human being in civilization's history." —Steve Wynn, Fox News Sunday, October 11, 2009
Free-market medicine link of the week
Sunday, October 11th, 2009Health Care: A Future Free-Market Alternative by Ross Levatter, published in the October 2009 issue of The Freeman. It is a relatively detailed description of Dr. Levatter's vision of the way the purchase and provision of health care would work in a free society: the way all other aspects of ...
Fish in a barrel 3
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009Nate Anderson of Ars Technica wrote, Licensed spectrum came into being for a reason. In the early days of radio, unlicensed radio stations in urban areas regularly got into "power wars" with rival stations, leading to plenty of static. Compared to this free-for-all, the licensing of radio stations in the US, ...
Obama’s speech about socialized medicine
Thursday, September 10th, 2009I didn't watch the Savior of America's speech to Congress about further socializing our health care and insurance industry because I already knew everything he was going to say. Why would I waste my time with it? He probably said our health care system is broken, that it's too costly ...
Pirates: orderly anarchists
Saturday, July 11th, 2009Libertarian psychologist and Skepticblagger Michael Shermer has an interesting review of Peter Leeson's new book, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, in the July 9, 2009 issue of Nature. While neither Shermer, nor Leeson, nor I would defend pirate societies as the pinnacle of liberty and cultural progress, ...
Conservatism is fatally flawed
Sunday, June 14th, 2009Is capitalism fatally flawed? asks Paul McDonnold in the Christian Science Monitor. Recessions, like hurricanes, leave wreckage behind—bankrupt businesses, high unemployment, and sometimes even tattered philosophies. No, they don't. Inflationary booms leave bankrupt businesses and unemployment, not to mention devalued currency, behind. Recessions correct those mistakes. The only "tattered philosophy" I've ...
Obama stimulus plan fomenting trade war
Sunday, May 24th, 2009The Obama regime's short-sighted but typical "buy American" stimulus policies are beginning to foment a trade war between the United States and other countries. Ordered by Congress to "buy American" when spending money from the $787 billion stimulus package, the town of Peru, Ind., stunned its Canadian supplier by rejecting ...
If another recession follows, then the economy never recovered
Saturday, May 23rd, 2009Robert Gordon of the Business Cycle Dating Committee says our recession has just ended. He bases his proclamation on some pretty strong precedent, as Donal Luskin explains in the linked article. Gordon looked at the statistics for claims for unemployment benefits during the last several recessions and noticed that, historically, ...
Star Trek can’t calculate
Monday, May 11th, 2009I like Star Trek a lot despite its absurdly unrealistic vision of the future of humanity. In what is probably the funniest drama ever made, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Admiral Kirk goes out to lunch with a woman in 20th-century San Francisco, and when the waiter brings the ...
Obama stimulus plan provides bubble for green jobs
Thursday, May 7th, 2009MSNBC reports, "Stimulus plan provides boost to green jobs" and Obama's "green adviser" has said, "Everyone is predicting growth in this sector." See? It's happening! The green bubble is expanding! The Imperial Federal Government is diverting resources from one bubble and pushing them into another. The Obama regime thinks it can ...
Austrian business cycle theory in action
Sunday, May 3rd, 2009The comments in this thread were pretty funny. In response to the video of half-built homes being demolished so that the building company could cut its losses in post-inflationary-boom California, commenter RWW said: A commenter in the YouTube thread says: wouldn't destroying homes help the housing market? the banks can take the ...
Consumer and tourist spending
Wednesday, April 15th, 2009One of the many fallacies I hear people on TV and radio repeat is that anything that increases consumer spending should be lauded because it's good for the economy. Tourism spending, sports-event-related spending, and the like are presented as being healthy and a great boon to the host city or ...
The Krugman Depression
Monday, April 13th, 2009This economics blagger asks: What name would you give to this econo-geddon? The Great Recession? Global financial meltdown? The Bush–Obama Depression? My answer: the Krugman Depression. I want to start calling the depression of 1929-1945 the Keynes Depression and the current one the Krugman Depression. Oh, our professional criminal class bears ...
Obamaism is Statism
Friday, April 10th, 2009Out of some strange curiosity I decided to peruse The New Yorker, probably because it is supposed to be a source of good artistic criticism, cultural-political commentary, and humor. One of the first things that caught my eye was "Obamaism" by George Packer. It is supposed to be a commentary ...
Books
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009When I leave my career in science research to produce something useful for the world, I want writing to be at the center of my professional endeavors (and still a major hobby as well). Analyzing policy, or economics, or science, or something else for some think tank, media outlet, biotech ...
Blagnet.net’s quiz of the day
Tuesday, April 7th, 2009Who said the following? It must be understood that toil alone makes for accomplishment and advancement, and righteous possession is the reward of toil, and its incentive. There is no progress except in the stimulus of competition. When competition—natural, fair, impelling competition—is suppressed, whether by law, compact or conspiracy, we halt the ...
Blagnet.net’s link of the day
Sunday, April 5th, 2009Despite the fact that I hardly have time to read and write as much as I want about political economy and philosophy, I am trying to make an effort to frequent my less-frequented blags, find new blags worth frequenting, and read about something other than economics (in both web pages ...
The next two bubbles
Wednesday, April 1st, 2009Based on the Obama regime's policies, both implemented and proposed, I think there is good reason to expect the American economy to experience unsustainable bubbles in the automotive industry and the "green" technology fields. There is ample reason to believe neither one is justified in receiving as much investment or ...
Rothbard on inflationary booms
Monday, March 30th, 2009From Chapter 3 of What Has Government Done To Our Money?, originally published in 1964. (This is from the 1980 version, so I'm not 100% positive this passage appeared verbatim in the 1964 edition—either way, it provides yet another example of the ability of free-market economists to predict and explain ...
The eternal truth of market principles
Saturday, March 28th, 2009As I understand it, one of the great philosophical contributions that Ludwig von Mises made to the world was not simply to explain why governmental perturbation of market forces doesn't work, but to explain that it can't work—he explained how the things that the State can achieve are limited by ...
My bank gives bailout money back
Saturday, March 7th, 2009Well, it's trying to. The bank I put my non-shiny currency in, TCF Bank, has filed paperwork to give its $361 million of bailout money back to the Imperial Federal Government. It's hard to imagine a libertarian advocating giving money to the government, but the executives at TCF know it ...
Misconceptions about credit and borrowing
Wednesday, March 4th, 2009Democratic politicians and bureaucrats, supporters of Obama's stimulus spending and potential financial-sector interventions, and believers in Keynesian socialism in general are quite adamant about "getting credit flowing again" and easing the pain of businesses by getting people to buy more stuff. I'm starting to think a lot of their misconceptions ...
Water shortage does not equal water scarcity
Wednesday, February 25th, 2009I liked this column by Chris Brown for the Ludwig von Mises Institute because it echoed some points I made in two previous posts: Water shortages and water-trading between states and Scarcity is not shortage. Some excerpts (italics in original): The government has blamed the shortage of water on drought and ...
Quote of the day
Thursday, February 19th, 2009Writes Robert Higgs: These [public–private] partnerships, which epitomize economic fascism, promise to waste resources on a wide front. The idea that politicians and politically appointed “experts,” in league with rent-seeking businessmen, can allocate resources more effectively than the private capital markets is a characteristic form of the folly that is leading ...
Mark Skousen on gross output
Saturday, February 7th, 2009Frequent reader kerrjac commented on my recent post, Saving is good, not bad, for American economy with this tidbit about the opinions of economist Mark Skousen. Responding to my comment that many people claim consumption is 70% of our GDP, he said, Recently I’ve been reading economist Mark Skousen, who has ...
Saving is good, not bad, for American economy
Sunday, February 1st, 2009I was pretty angered by this Associated Press article, Americans save just when economy needs their money, by Martin Crutsinger. The very reason that Western economies, especially the U.S.'s, have experienced bubbles that have burst and left many people with dying businesses, foreclosed homes, no jobs, and insufficient savings ...