Solar powered trash cans do not pass the smell test. It is claimed that by installing solar panels on a bulky trash can that landfill space is saved and that maybe carbon emissions are reduced. Of course, the places that purchase and use these trash cans seem to not actually measure whether these trash cans […]
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Posted in Economic Illiteracy on Dec 17th, 2020
I am just finishing up the absolutely gut-wrenching book from Frank Dikotter, Mao’s Great Famine. Words cannot do it justice. Just as the Hiroshima story and the Auschwitz story and the slavery story must be told and retold and taught to our children, it would be unconscionable for all of us not to be very well […]
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Posted in Economic Illiteracy on Nov 29th, 2020
Read the entire thing: The way forward must therefore involve bolstering an emotionally compelling narrative of freedom which foregrounds the threats emanating from a politics of psychic redistribution. Government has an important role to play here, balancing the teaching of minoritarian narratives of slavery, Jim Crow, and the Holocaust with an equivalent appreciation of the […]
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Posted in Economic Illiteracy on Nov 28th, 2019
Today I reprint a slightly edited piece I put together several years ago. I’d change a lot of it, from the content to the tone, if I were to do it over – but one must live with one’s younger self. Happy Thanksgiving to all. Four centuries after the celebration of the first Thanksgiving, there […]
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For years I have waffled back and forth between being way too reactionary and concerned about the insane ideas that are put forth, or way too lax in trying to stay out of the news. For my own mental health and for what I thought would help contribute to good debate, I have chosen to […]
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“This is, of course, a very unrealistic assumption … these operations are often extremely costly … to prevent many transactions.” That was him referring to the oft-straw man argument by opponents of Coasean insights about “transactions costs being zero.” Coase obviously knew that. And he obviously was making a different point. The Coase Theorem as […]
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Posted in Economic Illiteracy, Socialism on Oct 2nd, 2018
Just a few scattered thoughts: Universities are corporations It is probably closer to the truth to appreciate that non-profits exist to serve the interests of their donors and workers more than they do their stated “charitable” objective Almost every entity that engages in some kind of production and planning, from the most wild free-market agencies […]
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… for the “rules of economics” not to apply! How often have you heard things like, “during an emergency, the rules of economics don’t apply!”? Or, health care and the environment are too important for the rules of economics to apply. Economics just doesn’t belong here. If only! To suggest that the rules of economics […]
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When you sit through a Physics 101 course, you are taught fundamental laws of motion, particularly Newtownian mechanics. You are then assigned problems that may go something like: you jump naked off of the Freedom Tower, and there is no wind velocity in any direction. How long until impact? And then you go ahead and […]
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