The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. – F.A. Hayek
Posted in Institutions on Jun 5th, 2011
Remember that to be part of my series, the proposal must not be one that can easily be demagogued by either the left or right and that it is not offered directly in the spirit of increasing or decreasing government, among other requirements. If I were King for a Day I would like to institute [...]
Posted in Institutions on May 28th, 2011
Just to illustrate the absurdity of our modern police state. I was stopped while driving through a toll booth a few weeks ago and the officer claimed I had violated the hands-free cell-phone law. Now I am pretty aware of the legislation that says you cannot speak on your cell phone in my car. Do [...]
Posted in Government Thuggery, Institutions on Apr 17th, 2011
Maybe it is well known that the major discrimination faced by blacks in the South originated from government laws like Jim Crow laws that institutionalized something that good economics seemed to have been eroding. But how well known is the fact that early efforts by governments to provide (modest) welfare benefits to the poor were [...]
Posted in Economic Illiteracy, Environment, Institutions on Dec 16th, 2010
Earlier this month, we nominated EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson for the First Economic Darwin Award. What follows is her very lengthy award citation. In red you see the excerpts from the entirety of the OpEd she wrote in the December 2nd edition of the Wall Street Journal. Everything else is my commentary. Despite the length [...]
Posted in Flotsam and Jetsam, Institutions on Nov 29th, 2010
In the Constitution of Liberty Hayek claims that society would be well served if we randomly selected 1 in 1000 people and endowed them with enough wealth so they could independently pursue any project of their choosing! The random part is important – if we had to decide as a “society” to reward a particular [...]
Posted in History, Institutions on Nov 10th, 2010
The only memory I have of my $100,000+ education is a small seminar I took with the then President of the College, Peter Pouncey. I was totally lost and clueless about much of anything we read and discussed. But I knew it was important stuff. Indeed, my most vivid memory was a class where we [...]
Posted in Institutions on Sep 23rd, 2010
There is a reason they say that, “the devil is in the details.” A much neglected work of Hayek is his 1939 manuscript, “Freedom and the Economic System.” In it he points out something that would probably open up a lot of my students eyes, especially those who ask things like, “if X is so [...]
Posted in Government Thuggery, Institutions on Sep 7th, 2010
Perhaps the most underestimated force for “not good” are the local politicians and the unelected officials on various local committees. Just think of the power local zoning boards have over your life. In my neighborhood, I need to get the “permission” of a bunch of do-gooders if I am to put up a storage shed [...]
Posted in Institutions on Aug 31st, 2010
Megan McArdle commenting on how “natural” polyamory is (as some evolutionary biologists exclaim): Rape seems to be pretty “natural”, but I’d still like to build social institutions that fight this “natural instinct”. I don’t have any nits to pick on the topic of monogamy, I am thinking, rather, of how one can apply Megan’s thought [...]
Posted in Institutions, Methodology on Aug 30th, 2010
An old good friend of mine from college posted on Facebook the other day: 1 military suicide every 36 hours; current prevention programs are not working: http://tiny.cc/9tx05 Clicking through to the referenced link you see the actual data: The report noted that from 2005 to 2009, more than 1,100 servicemembers committed suicide—an average of 1 [...]
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