The Unbroken Window

Whether you believe in Anthropogenic Global Warming. Do you know what the best predictor of whether you believe gun control laws should be relaxed? It’s whether you believe the Fed is being too aggressive at the monetary spigot right now. Now ignore the reason you need to affiliate with a particular political party for the [...]

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To make sure we don’t get billed for late fees without being notified that something is going to be late, right? Yet why should there have to be a next time? Why should keeping an ordinary driver’s license up to date oblige anyone to deal with a government agency, in person or online? I hadn’t even [...]

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John Goodman, summarizing the failure of the Medicare pilot programs to produce cost reductions, asks rhetorically: Can you think of any other market where the buyers of a product are trying to tell the sellers how to efficiently produce it? Great quote. I’d say that higher education gets close particularly if we take a generous [...]

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Germane to our post earlier today, this new paper by Valerie Ramey (she’s found similar results in the past, something I will write about later on) finds that government spending multipliers are less than one (i.e. for every dollar of government spending, less than $1 of new economic activity is created) and that while government [...]

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I am sure those of you who defend markets based on the logic of supply and demand or on the logic of trade and comparative advantage have encountered this reaction. I get this regularly of course, even after I move from the models to dramatic illustrations of how they have worked in practice and even [...]

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This is how I thought news magazine pieces used to be written. If you can spare 20 minutes, please do read Adam Davidson’s outstanding Atlantic piece on modern manufacturing in America. It’s not just about manufacturing (or really much about it). It demonstrates a solid and nuanced understanding of economics, and should be the starting [...]

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More from Ralph Raico: Egged on by (Eleanor) Roosevelt, the FBI “began to tap the telephones and open the mail of vocal opponents of FDR’s foreign policy and to monitor anti-intervention rallies.” It “initiated surveillance of several of the president’s prominent congressional critics,” including Senators Burton K. Wheeler and Gerald Nye. The White House and [...]

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I was perusing my National Parks magazine and they made reference to the fact that policemen used to monitor the height of women’s bathing suits at the DC Tidal Basin Beach. It turns out to be true. Here is a photo from 1922 showing a man enforce the government’s rule that bathing suits could be [...]

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I strongly recommend reading Alex Tabarrok’s short e-Book Launching the Innovation Renaissance, which I will blog on shortly. Professor Tabarrok blogs it a little today, here is the entire thing: We like to think of ourselves as an innovation nation but our government is a warfare-welfare state. To build an economy for the 21st century [...]

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That’s my name for the theory that proponents of natural capital accounting use about how economics works. In a recent paper discussing the value of natural environmental amenities and how free-markets are totally predisposed to reducing these stocks to zero over time, the following argument come up twice. It is that when market priced goods [...]

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