The Unbroken Window

Something of a blogosphere explosion occurred last week. What caused it? A largely correct post by Paul Krugman that had the gist of arguing that the amount of US federal government debt is a misleading indicator of how serious the US debt problem is. Here is my colleague Steve Landburg illuminating and buttressing the point. [...]

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The following is a guest post by my friend Michael Stahlman. Profit (and loss) is an amoral market signal that guide economic transactions.  It works automatically within the price system to direct goods and services to the persons most willing to pay for them, and this usually reflects society’s collective demand for scarce goods and [...]

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One of my favorite Christmas cartoons (claymations) was the Year Without a Santa Claus. That’s the one with this guy in it: His brother Snow Miser is also in the show. I got to thinking about their names while hanging some Christmas lights the other night and you know what? They’re incredibly stupid! Calling these [...]

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We just learned that the post office is losing another $5 billion this year. This is on top of a $10 billion loss and a long history of destroying resources. Among the many problems with the post office (aside from bureaucracy serially allergic to entrepreneurship and serving customers) is that it has way over-capitalized itself [...]

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One of my favorite essay questions assigned to students in my environmental economics class requires them to think about how government ownership and management of National Parks differs from alternative arrangements. I do not wish to write my version of the essay here. I do want to make a few observations. First, you would be [...]

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Among the avalanche of policies that has been enacted in the name of igniting a green economic revolution (taxes, subsidies, loan guarantees, tariffs, …) include mandates for use of particular technologies. Good economists will understand the basic problem with mandates (they are a classic input standard, which is theoretically and empirically inferior to output standard [...]

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I was walking around a local market not too long ago and overheard someone speaking about he virtues of “fresh food” and in particular the food that goes “from farm to table” – you know, the stuff grown locally and then eaten in season. I hate that I have to preface everything I say with [...]

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It is sometimes thought that certain major exporters of important materials such as oils and rare earth metals have what amounts to a “weapon.” It is sad that such language is regularly used. Why, for instance, might Saudi Arabia have an oil “weapon?” Well, the idea is that they have something we want, oil, and [...]

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I’ve commonly encountered arguments for regulating various markets that sound like, “well, if you allowed for a market, then the poor wouldn’t be able to afford it.” That’s certainly true. This thought is not about rationing devices and the poor in general, but rather it is asking a simple consistency question. The most common market [...]

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I don’t think so, but consider this: a great deal of disruption was thought to have been caused by rapidly falling farm prices in the late 1920s and into the 1930s. Indeed, most of the horrible things done by FDR’s first New Deal involved gruesome attempts to raise farm prices amidst massive unemployment (unlike anything [...]

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