The Unbroken Window

Fun with barcodes
Mom on a rampage
Strange things in Google Maps
What are you doing? It’s a service I’d never use, ever … unless you asked me of course.
I fell for this on April Fool’s Day.

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Like many others that believe the tax code is unnecessarily complex, that tax rates are too high, that government spending and regulations are exhorbitantly excessive, I often point to research that shows how many billions of dollars and how many millions of hours Americans spend preparing their taxes each year.
But suppose I get to live […]

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 In medieval Europe, manufacturers sold durable goods to anonymous consumers in distant markets, this essay argues, by making products with conspicuous characteristics. Examples of these unique, observable traits included cloth of distinctive colors, fabric with unmistakable weaves, and pewter that resonated at a particular pitch. These attributes identified merchandise because consumers could observe them readily, […]

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The following is my editing, rewriting and excerpting various portions of a 1995 publication by my colleague Walker Todd entitled, ”The Federal Reserve and the Rise of the Corporate State.” 
Many of the issues that had been at the forefront of Anglo-American constitutional and economic debates from the time of Francis Bacon (early 17th century) onward were again […]

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at the Masters. It was worth every penny.
My father and I had the good fortune of winning tickets to attend a practice round at the 2008 Masters Golf Tournament in Augusta, GA. The tradition-rich golf tournament is so popular with fans that a waiting list for tickets to see the actual tournament was opened in […]

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The store management’s fears were well founded. When consumers knew just how much more taxes would cost them, they reduced their purchases of the items by about 7 percent. As part of the working paper-titled “Salience and Taxation: Theory and Evidence,” coauthored by Adam Looney of the Federal Reserve Board and Kory Kroft of Berkeley’s […]

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The mean center of population for the United States has moved steadily southward and westward since our Nation’s founding. For example, in 1790, the center of U.S. population was in Kent County along Maryland’s Eastern Shore. By the start of the Civil War it had moved to Pike County in South Central Ohio. The center […]

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According to the College Board, the average freshmen at Yale - a “private” institution with a tax-exempt endowment in the $20 billion range - receives over $11,000 in government grants to help pay for his education.
The average freshmen at Mississippi State and the University of Mississippi - both public institutions - receive just over $4,000.
That […]

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I found out that among Americans that live in Money Magazine’s “100 Best Places to Live”, the annual average amount spent on vacations was $8,250. That is roughly 10% of median (pre-tax) income (about $90,000). Assuming that the tax taking authorities avail themselves of 33% of income on average, that means that families in these […]

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“Capitalists” (as if  that was some sort of dirty word - if your grandmother owns any mutual funds she is rightly called a capitalist) are accused of exploiting workers in the sense that firm owners/shareholders receive the bulk of the value that its employees create.

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