The Unbroken Window

Reflect for a moment on the original state of man as God (or who or whatever you do or do not believe in) instituted it. Men are born with vastly varying degrees of attractiveness, strength, energy, intelligence, propensity for disease, and so on. Furthermore, man’s physical location across the globe has placed some at great [...]

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Briefly consider a mantra of the progressive left: “that if people had to provide for the education of their own children, many children would go without schooling.” Regular readers know that the history of education in this country certainly does not bare this idea out. But what of today? We seriously cannot run any policy [...]

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Orthodox Keynesians argue that in times when aggregate demand is slack, it makes no difference whether you employ people to dig holes and fill them back up or whether you actually pay people to produce public goods that are valuable. Suppose we accept this proposition – that it doesn’t matter just so long as the [...]

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Tom Palmer points us to two statements in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights:
Article 24:
Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.
Article 25:
Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of [...]

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This via Greg Mankiw:
Billy Raye, a 51-year-old unemployed bike courier, is looking for work.
Fortunately for him, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Council of Carpenters is seeking paid demonstrators to march and chant in its current picket line outside the McPherson Building, an office complex here where the council says work is being done with nonunion labor.
“For a [...]

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The AP reports today that:
ATLANTA (AP) — About a quarter of the swine flu vaccine produced for the U.S. public has expired – meaning that a whopping 40 million doses worth about $260 million is being written off as trash.
“It’s a lot, by historical standards,” said Jerry Weir, who oversees vaccine research and review for [...]

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Much is often made of the “deindustrialization” of America. Now, the data do not support this – the US is the world’s largest manufacturer and its manufacturing output today (at least before the recession) was larger than at any point in its history. However, what is true is that the portion of the labor force [...]

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I do not believe that it is possible to be both a paternalist (libertarian or otherwise) and also be a strong advocate of government schooling.
The argument that Thaler and Sunstein make in their book Nudge is that many individuals make bad decisions when left to their own devices because they are short-sighted, ill-informed, undisciplined, or [...]

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… then why do governments nonetheless enact many policies that monied interests are strongly opposed to? Doesn’t big business abhor taxes? Then why is the corporate tax structure in the US perhaps worse than in any industrialized nation? Don’t monied interests want a race to the bottom in environmental and food safety and drug safety [...]

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Private companies have a monopoly on that, right? Warren Meyer reminds us of the reality:
But supporters of government superiority to private enterprise argue that this is exactly why government is superior, because it does not have these short-term focused goals.  HAH!
Politicians are among the worst at this.  It used to be they would do short [...]

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