The Unbroken Window

I quote Robin Hanson in his entirety:
Set Obama’s Bar
We’ve heard a lot of hyperbole about how Bush was the “Worst. President. Ever.” and Obama’s inauguration is the most exciting in a half century. So to avoid future bias, this is a good time to ask yourself: where do you set Obama’s bar? That [...]

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A while ago, I talked about one reason the U.S. tax system was hypocritical. If Jones makes wheat and maple syrup for himself, he is not forced to pay taxes on this. However, if he and Smith agree to split up the work – with Smith making syrup and Jones making wheat, and then they [...]

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My colleague Steven Landsburg writes excellent books. These are not just words on paper, but rather he is engaged in the process of creating knowledge.  Do you think we should pass a law that bans him from also being allowed to disseminate that knowledge to paying students and colleagues?You know, because it would be oh [...]

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… has no dominion over me. Nor does its Executive. This letter was written well over 100 years ago, and it has stood the test of time. Here are my favorite parts:
To say that the people of this country ever have bound, or ever could bind, themselves by any contract [...]

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I have long agreed with the monetarists (famously Milton Friedman) that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. This hypothesis seems to be strongly supported by the data:

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Via Greg Mankiw:
More Spending Stimulus Skeptics
The Chicago Tribune reports: John Cochrane, a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, says that among academics over the last 30 years, the idea of fiscal stimulus has been discredited and in graduate courses, it is “taught only for its fallacies.”
New York University [...]

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Meat?
Plastic?
Building Material?
Oh yeah, Grain too.
I love this show. Watch the show. Then imagine all of the entrepreneurs out there working with the thousands of agricultural products we use and have yet to discover …
That’s the creative part of creative destruction … and perhaps reflecting on it will brighten your day during these seemingly tough economic [...]

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On Brad DeLong’s website, I posted what I thought was a polite comment in response to his attack on people who disagree with his socialist ideas. Here is a snippet of his attack:
 Other ethics-free Republican hacks, whose organizations share in their burning of their own credibility:
Steven Horwitz, Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics, St. Lawrence [...]

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Greg Mankiw demonstrates:
Apparently, Team Obama is not convinced by the recent research of Christina and David Romer, who conclude:
tax changes have very large effects on output. Our baseline specification suggests that an exogenous tax increase of one percent of GDP lowers real GDP by roughly three percent. Our many robustness checks [...]

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Tim Geither, nominee for Treasury Secretary, has been found to not paid $34,000 in taxes over a 4-year period when he earned income (as a consultant?) from the IMF that was not salary income. Some folks are using this issue to raise questions about his ethics and whether he is fit for the job.

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