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 Methodology, Politics on May 8th, 2013
Several of my more classically liberal oriented friends work for government universities. And you can imagine what the response of their critics might be when they learn of this fact. “What a hypocrite!” is the closest response, meaning that someone who promotes the principle of limited government, the importance of private property rights and contract [...]
Posted in Methodology on Apr 29th, 2013
Nothing new really going on at my home university. I look forward to the “Social Science Task Force” being created, chaired by the Chair of the Department of Cherokee Poetry Studies that will re-evaluate the proper place of economics on campus. To be fair, our university DID just host a talk on fracking that included [...]
Posted in Classical Liberalism, Methodology, Welfare State, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Apr 16th, 2013
As I grow crankier, I am seeing myself disagreeing more with the thoughtful left. I am somewhat surprised by this as I had always assumed the opposite would happen. For today’s edition let me excerpt from a lefty website that I quite enjoy reading despite its regular ad-hominem bashing and mischaracterization of views different than [...]
Posted in Methodology, Politics on Apr 8th, 2013
What is the methodology used by folks who argue at the same time that: (1) We should NOT push hard for laws that require voters to present valid identification (the proposed laws are more nuanced than that). (2) WE SHOULD push hard for laws that require valid identification (and background checks) for people who wish [...]
Posted in Environment, Market Failures, Methodology, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Apr 1st, 2013
The following thoughts were motivated by my colleague’s musings this morning. When we discuss possible justifications for providing subsidies to students to attend college, aside from the possibility that educating young people in Universities might provide benefits to the rest of us that we do not pay for ourselves (you KNOW I am very skeptical [...]
Posted in Economics Problems, incentives, Methodology, Politics on Mar 22nd, 2013
What can the economics of altruism inform us about why we might hold particular political beliefs? Lots, I think. Let’s assume for simplicity that altruism is an act or emotion that provides no benefit to oneself and which redounds exclusively to someone else. Some may go so far as to suggest that true altruism must [...]
Posted in Education, Methodology, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Mar 18th, 2013
I’ve got many an acquaintance who are involved in some way in educating young kids (notice I did not say children). One of the fashionable teaching ideologies today is that students should be the teachers of themselves. While there is much to the idea in various contexts, as a driving force for educating kids it [...]
Posted in Methodology on Mar 10th, 2013
From an editor of Scientific American, regarding comments on his Scientific American blog: The same goes for climate change. It is a fact that global warming is true. And it is also a well established fact that humans played a big role in it. And the notion that if we broke it we should fix [...]
Posted in Environment, Methodology, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Mar 7th, 2013
This is particularly the case on college campuses – a place where we claim we are in pursuit of truth, but then promote a doctrine where there is no such thing as objective truth. It must be hard being a college marketing director living with that strange contradiction. We are regularly peppered here both from [...]
Posted in Economic Illiteracy, Methodology on Mar 1st, 2013
Consider the following. At the time of independence, the U.S. was essentially an economic backwater. By the time World War I broke out, we were clearly the world’s economic and military powerhouse. Just think of what the institutional set up was like that led to us going from third world status to history-making power! There [...]
![[Most Recent Quotes from www.kitco.com]](http://www.kitconet.com/charts/metals/gold/t24_au_en_usoz_2.gif)
![[Most Recent Quotes from www.kitco.com]](http://www.kitconet.com/charts/metals/silver/t24_ag_en_usoz_2.gif)