The Unbroken Window

Jason Furman and Steven Landsburg are having an econ-celebrity death match over at the LA Times. My favorite salvo to date:
 

It seems fundamentally unfair to say that we’ll help you out with an expensive stimulus package if you lost your job this month, but we’ll foot you with the bill for that package if you […]

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One of the most amusing things about living in Western Massachusetts, perhaps the least freedom friendly place in the United States, is how serious people take their politics. It is a way of life here, something by which people define themselves. Deval Patrick wins the governorship - people literally dance in the streets; George Bush […]

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I recently attended a lecture where the speaker showed the Heritage Foundation’s Economic Freedom Index, and showed the now famous chart (scroll down to Chart 4) demonstrating that countries with higher freedom indexes have higher income.While I clearly believe in the importance of property rights and free markets, these sort of indices are little more […]

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Our Founders drafted the Constitution with fewer than 5,000 words; with later amendments it is about 8,000 words. The federal tax code is more than 9 million words. So the document that created the government is less than 0.1% as long as the tax code that funds it. Such is the state of Washington today.

From […]

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Even if Congress meets its goal of finishing a stimulus bill before March, it is likely to take until June for the government to start sending out the millions of rebate checks that would be the plan’s centerpiece. It would take a couple more months before all the checks could be mailed.
The IRS — and […]

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it seems that the growth of the Sunbelt has little to do with the sun.

That is Ed Glaeser and Kristina Tobio in the latest Southern Economic Journal. Having lived in Massachusetts, New York and Kentucky that statement is completely unsurprising, despite what grumpy Northerners would tell you.

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It doesn’t hurt to shed a few tears. Here, once again, is Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments:

they have little modesty; are often assuming, arrogant, and presumptuous; great admirers of themselves, and great contemners of other people. Though their characters are in general much less correct, and their merit much inferior to that […]

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The “buy local” literature is littered with doozies. Here are two more.

Small business is the best way to ensure innovation and low prices over the long-term.

Prevent multi-national big box stores from entering your town … because it will extract monopoly rents from us.

You can get a flavor for some of these arguments here and here. […]

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One of the common reasons individuals in certain communities give us to “buy local” is that buying local will cut out the “middleman” (you know, the evil merchants and traders, reviled since biblical times) and enable growers to focus on other things. These same individuals then launch a marketing effort to have us joining Community […]

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This from Golf World Magazine,

PGA Tour players can also rest easy knowing their tour has the ear of Capitol Hill. Most of us cannot touch our deferred income - IRA, 401(k) and the like - until we are 59 1/2 years old. But a tax bill passed in October 2004 grants an exemption for a […]

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