The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. – F.A. Hayek
Posted in Unintended Consequences on Nov 20th, 2008
The free market is running wild! Girls Gone Wild –> Attractive Girls Union Refuses To Enter Into Talks With Mike Greenman And yes, only the last piece is from the Onion. HT: my friend Ray D.
Posted in Paternalism, Regulation on Nov 19th, 2008
… Then they came for the aluminum bats … and then they came for the cigarettes … and now they are coming for the plastic bags. Pretty soon there was nothing left to come after. What a brave new world we live in. Sometimes it hurts to say I told you so.
Posted in Economic Illiteracy on Nov 19th, 2008
I often field concerns that the “market is great and all that, but the poor still get screwed because the people who have the money get the goodies.” To which there are many responses. The two I would like to mention, that are completely and utterly ignored by anti-market fundamentalists are: People seem to have [...]
Posted in Corporatism on Nov 18th, 2008
If I were a Congressman and had to write legislation, I would require that every single US Senator and Representative, every single employee and family member of the Big 3, every single person that distributes cars made by the Big 3, or produces parts that go into cars made by the Big 3, must only [...]
Posted in Environment on Nov 18th, 2008
In another leading textbook, this is a footnote to a comment on how some groups use “Rules of Thumb” to allocate a good or service: Sensitivity check. Although this phrase has been associated with the shocking idea that a husband can beat his wife so long as the stick is no thicker than his thumb, [...]
Posted in Competition, Corporatism on Nov 18th, 2008
Now healthy institutions buy battered ones just to get a place in line. Think of the type of competition that emerges when rationing is based on need rather some other mechanism. It surely is not productive for “society.” The healthy institution is terrified by the unhealthy ones, because the unhealthy ones have a claim on [...]
Posted in Price System on Nov 18th, 2008
We had our first snowfall of the year here in Rochester today.
Posted in incentives on Nov 18th, 2008
American church membership has risen throughout most of the past two centuries, from 17 percent of the population at the time of the American Revolution to 34 percent in the mid-19th century to over 60 percent today. The fraction of the U.S. population employed as clergy has remained stable at 1.2 per thousand for the [...]
Posted in Competition, Corporatism on Nov 17th, 2008
The purpose of my earlier post was in fact to look precisely at the trees that seem to go unnoticed when arguments in favor of the “forests” like Detroit get thrown around.
Posted in Corporatism, Extended Order, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Nov 14th, 2008
In today’s news Congress is inching ever so closer to providing a $25 billion emergency loan package for bail out the “Big 3″ American auto-manufacturers. This is not the first time they have done it.
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