Homines libenter quod volunt credunt
Posted in ethical foundations on Nov 23rd, 2013
Is it OK to discriminate against people because they are smokers? You may argue it’s a simple matter of yes if smokers are imposing costs on you. But what about when they are not imposing costs on you? On the one hand, smokers tend to have characteristics that are affiliated with worse life outcomes than […]
Posted in Entrepreneurs, Environment, ethical foundations, Extended Order, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Nov 21st, 2013
Lest I be accused of being a shill for the coal sector, one ought to peruse my many previous comments on coal. Furthermore, I do not own any direct stake in any coal company aside from what my Vanguard mutual funds may be investing in. Furthermore, supporting coal is not good for my long-term career […]
Posted in Behavior, ethical foundations, Government Gone Wild on Nov 18th, 2013
A new NBER Paper finds: In this paper, we demonstrate that university students who cheat on a simple task in a laboratory setting are more likely to state a preference for entering public service. Importantly, we also show that cheating on this task is predictive of corrupt behavior by real government workers, implying that this measure captures a meaningful propensity […]
Posted in Behavior, ethical foundations, Special Privilege on Nov 13th, 2013
This news item caught my eye: The free market of ideas serves those exceptional few with the most intellectual and social capital…only by subjecting everyone else to even higher levels of social control and intellectual scrutiny, all the while asserting these same people’s ‘liberty’ and ‘equal right to speak.’ So not only are markets tools […]
Posted in Central Planning, Classical Liberalism, ethical foundations, If I Really Hated the Poor ... on Nov 12th, 2013
And so it has absolutely no chance of seeing the light of day. Tyler Cowen links to this Reihan Salam post summarizing a good argument from Avik Roy’s new book: offer a coverage option that better meets the needs of the poor while also reducing public expenditures: Start by paying a primary-care physician $80 a […]
Posted in Environment, ethical foundations, Standards of Living, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Nov 5th, 2013
Coming up with a policy to deal with “climate change” (assume we need one for now) requires that we come up with some estimate of how much we care about future generations. There is simply no avoiding that. In all the sciency-goodness out there, I see very little discussion of this – it is merely […]
Posted in Economic Illiteracy, Environment, ethical foundations, If I Really Hated the Poor ..., You Can't Have it Both Ways on Nov 1st, 2013
If you are trying to be “green” then you better not own a dog. Just sayin. Hard to take all of the preachy moralizing seriously otherwise. Here’s a fun research question. Compare the environmental impacts of household dog ownership with hydraulic fracturing rocks to release organic, naturally occurring methane. And if, as you correctly want […]
Posted in ethical foundations, Institutions on Oct 13th, 2013
We’ve suggested here several times that regardless of one’s views of the President’s economic and foreign policy positions or even your own political disposition, it would be hard to argue that he has been great for the black community. The latest illustration (or lack thereof) has been the President’s awkward silence on the Adrian Peterson […]
Posted in ethical foundations, If I Really Hated the Poor ... on Oct 7th, 2013
Regular readers surely know about our fondness here at TUW for these little buggers. They are not just tucked away in the deep dark corners of campus either. In this episode of the Cricket Chronicles, we engage the question of what moral limits there are to markets, or at least one small aspect of this […]
Posted in ethical foundations, Inequality, Methodology on Oct 1st, 2013
For those of you looking for good reasons to support progressive taxation (note that is different than asking one group to pay more, we are asking them to pay more than more), I would suggest you stay away from the idea that “a dollar is worth more to a poor person than a rich person.” For starters, […]