The Unbroken Window

What, exactly, does “Food Democracy” mean anyway? When I am up for another rant I may actually go sentence by sentence through the linked story. In the meantime, let me offer up a piece of advice to the people who want to Occupy My Dinner Table: try capitalism. You don’t like it that a few [...]

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I suspect many readers have dabbled in Sunday church attendance. Here is a Coasean thought for those who worry about US National Defense spending and the budget. Perhaps the best way to salvage the federal budget (absent entitlement reform) and to also protect ourselves militarily is to immediately and unilaterally drop all subsidies and tariffs. [...]

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If it is truly the case that there are information asymmetries in insurance markets (i.e. firms do not know who their risky or non-risky customers are), then please explain to me again why we have/need laws that force insurers to charge the same price to all comers?

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I just saw this via Alex Tabarrok: The Hill: Six House Democrats, led by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), want to set up a “Reasonable Profits Board” to control gas profits. The Democrats, worried about higher gas prices, want to set up a board that would apply a “windfall profit tax” as high as 100 percent [...]

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OK, I cannot give it yet to Romney until he gets the nomination, but how about this bozo (Markey, not Giberson)? The USDOE’s response apparently didn’t mitigate Markey’s concern; today the Congressman introduced two bills intended to impede the export of natural gas. (See here and here.) One bill would prevent the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission from [...]

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Another gem from Paul Starr’s book, Remedy and Reaction: Medicare and Medicaid [wintercow: because they are entitlement programs] are not the only federal health care obligations with no annual limit on costs. Tax expenditures on health insurance — that is, taxes foregone because of medical deductions and the exclusion of employer contributions from taxable income [...]

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In a self-described balanced political treatment of the history of health care policy, Paul Starr delivers us this: What finally broke the grip of the hospitals (and later the doctors) on the methods of Medicare payment was the acute fiscal crisis that developed after Reagan cut taxes and increased military spending in 1981 and the [...]

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I cannot even begin to tell you how many times I am told, “yeah, supply and demand and prices work and all that, but if we allow them to run wild, the environment will inevitably be destroyed.”  These arguments are often levied far more vehemently in the presence of classical liberals than in more mainstream [...]

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I was recently pointed toward the following report on The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB). In the report I found that the authors claim that the amount of Natural Capital on the entire planet is somewhere between $2 trillion and $4 trillion. For a good description of natural capital from a good economist, see [...]

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About twice a year I end up writing a post screaming at people for not understanding what the term adverse selection means as it pertains to the health insurance market. I can almost understand if the popular press gets it wrong (not really, it is the job of real reporters to understand what they are [...]

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