Homines libenter quod volunt credunt
Posted in Economic Illiteracy, Economists, History on Dec 14th, 2017
I have written this a zillion times before … but I have been in and around economics since 1993, and never in my entire career have I had a teacher or article or book teach me about “trickle down” economics. This is a perjorative term conjured from the ether by anti-market proponents, and the strawiest […]
Posted in Disingenuous, Dynamism - Not, Economic Illiteracy, Government Gone Wild, If I Really Hated the Poor ..., Taxation on Dec 11th, 2017
As you ponder the inane debates about tax “reform” (i.e. deck chairs and symbolism), suppose you take the work of Martin Feldstein seriously. He has previously estimated that the dead weight loss in an economy due to taxation would be up to 30% of the size of the tax take. Now, I suspect the direct […]
Posted in Disingenuous, Government Gone Wild, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Dec 7th, 2017
I will preface this again by arguing that universities, when they are not functioning like kindergartens, are still a shining example of US excellence, sources of research and learning and hopefully positive spillovers, and we probably want to not destroy that. That said, redistributing priorities within many universities is probably in order and this tax […]
Posted in Government Gone Wild, Tribalism on Dec 6th, 2017
Somehow, I do not think that even the current train wreck of both our actual political governance and our political discourse will encourage anyone to actually question whether government should be as big, powerful and as expansive as it is. As one of my favorite Twitter feeds now reminds me, “Eat Arby’s.”
Posted in Central Planning, Extended Order, History, Institutions on Nov 23rd, 2017
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 […]
Posted in Entrepreneurs, Environment, ethical foundations, incentives, Institutions, Knowledge, Property Rights on Nov 19th, 2017
Before I proceed with this post, let’s get this out of the way. Here is a really cute elephant picture: And let me get the following out of the way: even though I understand the economics and arguments about why we may want to allow and perhaps even encourage hunting, I don’t like it at […]
Posted in ethical foundations, Government Gone Wild, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Nov 8th, 2017
I am definitely not getting invited to dinner parties after asking this question. When people illustrate the absolutely brutal record of socialism and communism as implemented in human history, we get the usual, “well, if only MY GUY was in charge” or if “only REAL and TRUE socialism were tried” then it would have worked, […]
Posted in Central Planning, Government Thuggery, If I Really Hated the Poor ... on Oct 27th, 2017
Heaven forbid if it were. Happy 100th Anniversary! The following is from “the secret archive,” published as “The Unknown Lenin” (1996), and the entry is dated March 1922: “It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the […]
Posted in Immigration on Oct 26th, 2017
Ran into this on the twitter machine. My grandparents and their parents came over here in various stages in the early 1900s, including some family members who seemed to have come illegally in the 1930s. Reprinted in full below: It’s a trope to say America has a long tradition of welcoming immigrants. This is only partially […]
Posted in Central Planning, Government Gone Wild, History on Aug 22nd, 2017
I was in the midst of my high school formative years when a couple of watershed moments in world history happened, and these had fantastically powerful and lasting impacts on me. I grew up in New York City during the Cold War, and there were nuclear fallout shelters in our little Catholic school, and the […]
