Archive for the ‘Economics’ Category
African nature preserves and the tragedy of the commons
Tuesday, July 8th, 2008In the July 4, 2008 issue of Science, there was a news & views article about over-hunting and poaching of animals on nature preserves in Africa, due to the large increase in human populations surrounding the preserves. It seems the establishment of nature preserves attracts people to settle around them, ...
Sarbanes-Oxley: helps big businesses, stifles small ones
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008This is my second post in one night about how, (1) governmental regulations that were meant to help and protect...someone, presumably...actually only help big, wealthy businesses, and, (2) their supporters never actually expected them to do any good for the general public, to begin with. B.K. Marcus writes about "putting the ...
Two Mises columns that expose economic follies
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008Thomas DiLorenzo exposes the moranic follies and the total immorality contained in a ludicrous article in Time magazine about how the next president should fix our economy. I have a feeling that if I had read the vacuous Time article without knowing where it came from, without knowing it was ...
Bob Murphy on oil prices and scapegoats
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008A few days ago, Bob Murphy asked his readers at Crash Landing what they'd like to see more of on the blag. I responded with: more clear, simple, step-by-step examples of how markets work and how governmental solutions to perceived market problems (or problems created by prior State interference) lead ...
Inflation in Zimbabwe
Saturday, May 24th, 2008Maybe you're familiar with Zimbabwe's brutal racist dictatorship commanded by Robert Mugabe, its runaway inflation, its millions of starved and murdered people, and its hotly contested recent elections. Well, at least there's some humor to be had in all this, at least from our perspective as comfortable Westerners. One Ian ...
What if climate-change alarmists are right?
Friday, May 23rd, 2008Max Borders presents a pretty good case as to why State solutions to those problems are worse than the problems themselves.
The economy is worse than you know
Saturday, May 10th, 2008I must offer a small retraction and an apology to at least a small number of MSM-print journalists out there because apparently some of them still do some worthy political commentating and question the establishment on serious matters. Kevin Phillips of Harper's Magazine wrote sort of an exposé on the ...
Ecological and Austrian theory
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008I'm in more of a link-and-run mood than a quote-and-philosophize mood (read: I'm short on time lately), so here's an interesting blag post from Liberty & Power: Ecological and Austrian theory, about the similarities between ecosystems and economic markets and the disconnect between people who advocate a "hands-off" or laissez-faire ...
Hillary and Obama differ on economics
Monday, May 5th, 2008So claims David Leonhardt of the New York Times. Well, obviously that is completely stupid. He writes, For all the similarities between the two Democrats, there is also a core thematic difference between them. Mrs. Clinton tends to favor narrowly focused programs, like the gas-tax holiday, that speak to specific voter ...
Biofuels demonstrate Bastiat’s broken window fallacy
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008This seems to me an excellent example of the broken window fallacy, or the law of unintended consequences: U.N. expert calls biofuel a "crime against humanity" because of all the food it wastes and the price increases it causes, when there are already shortages and high prices of food in ...
The capitalist reformer of Estonia
Saturday, April 19th, 2008Mart Laar, prime minister of the former Soviet republic of Estonia from 1992 to 1994 and from 1999 to 2002, won the 2006 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty from the Cato Institute. The Cato Institute's description of him says, Laar realized that the only way for Estonia to weather ...
The Great Depression, the current recession, and the importance of your vote
Sunday, April 13th, 2008If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal. —Emma Goldman Many comparisons have been made, at least by Austro-libertarian economists, of the Great Depression to the current inflationary recession. The reason the two periods are compared is that both recessions were caused by the same things: the Federal Reserve and ...
Stocks before whore, everyone’s poor
Thursday, March 27th, 2008The March 17 Daily Show had a great couple of segments on the idiotic federal government and Federal Reserve and the recession the United States is in. A rerun of this ran tonight at 8:00, which is why I'm blagging about it now. Talking about the $600 tax refund the State ...
Grade-A tirade
Thursday, March 27th, 2008Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an absolutely fantastic tirade about the complete embarrassment and failure of the Bush regime. Some highlights (the majority of the article, perhaps): You are not paying taxes merely to fund torture and bomb-dropping and the killing of countless innocents in Iraq in ...
Staggering ignorance
Friday, March 21st, 2008In this week's issue of Nature, John Browning reviews Nicholas Carr's latest book, The Big Switch. I like reading Nicholas Carr's blag, Rough Type, for its insights and commentaries on the computer/technology industry and its future. This post isn't really about Carr or his book or his blag or the future ...
Corporate-State Socialism in action
Monday, March 17th, 2008Sheldon Richman wrote two posts in the last two days that are great examples of blag posts about libertarianism and economics for non-libertarians. They are very instructive because they mention ways in which specific State actions help the rich and powerful and screw the little guy. In this case the ...
Unintended consequences in agriculture
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008Jack Hedin, a farmer from Minnesota, tells his story of how the United States Department of Agriculture prevents local growers from expanding to more than just farmers' markets. This is the result of coercive policies whose stated goal is to promote agriculture and help farmers. Since it must necessarily be ...
The collapse of the nation-state
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008Gary North wrote a fantastic column explaining why he thinks the central government of the United States will slowly decay until it collapses, and why he expects minarchism to return to this country during the lives of his grandchildren. He starts out with a list of government functions that libertarians ...
High rents are usually caused by…
Thursday, February 7th, 2008Anyone, anyone? Bueller?... Bueller?... Government! Ding ding ding ding ding! I'm not sure if Brian of the MGoBlog was being serious or mocking the business-hating State worshipers who surround him in Ann Arbor when he wrote this blag post about Leopold Brothers closing, but I'm sure plenty of our enlightened ...
Stefan Karlsson on that dolt Jim Cramer
Saturday, January 19th, 2008Swedish economist Stefan Karlsson provides some video evidence of what a dolt Jim Cramer is—but, then, most of us already knew that. Cramer, as far as I can tell, is basically a Keynesian who loves big government, wants it to intervene to solve all economic problems (even—no, especially the ones ...
Tim Swanson on the harm of State regulation of telecom
Thursday, December 27th, 2007Tim Swanson has written a collection of masterful columns for the Mises Institute, one in 2006 and two in the past week, about the harm already done to consumers by State intervention in the telecommunications industry and the harm that more State intervention will cause. I will try to amalgamate and ...
The sad state of Zimbabwe
Wednesday, December 26th, 2007Robert Mugabe has ruined the once-nice African nation of Zimbabwe because he, too, is a fascist, insane zealot. He is a racist who seized all the white people's land and drove every prosperous, successful person out of the country. His incompetent control of the central bank has resulted in astronomical ...
Bueno para los venezolanos
Wednesday, December 26th, 2007There was an article from Time magazine that was published at Yahoo.com, Why Venezuelans Turned on Chavez. Obviously Hugo Chavez is a fascist maniac who wants to become a totalitarian dictator because of how well that's worked in Latin America's past. That, I gathered from the article, is the ...