Homines libenter quod volunt credunt
Posted in Property Rights, Uncategorized on Jun 13th, 2012
There are times when the efficiency criteria breaks down as a useful guide to economic policymaking. These times occur most frequently in situations when property ownership conveys major differences in wealth – which leads to disparities in willingness-to-pay versus willingness-to-accept measures of value. An illustration will help. If you asked me how much I would […]
Posted in Market Failures, Politics on Mar 28th, 2012
I promised you yesterday that I would repeat this point. A public good is NOT a good that is provided by government. Find a new name for it. I have offered up in the past calling those things “government goods.” Public schooling is far more accurately called government schooling than public. The word “public” has […]
Some of you might be aware of the less “noble” origins of public schooling in America. Here is an illustration of early British attitudes toward it, from Bill Bryson’s At Home: Yet the idea of educating them (the masses) was treated almost universally with abhorrence. The fear was that educating the poor woudl fill them […]
I comment regularly on the impacts of the government controlling 90% of America’s youth. I am a product of Catholic schooling. But this leads me to a puzzle that I really cannot resolve, and I implore my readers for their thoughts. Here goes: I get apoplectic that the government monopolization of K12 education virtually ensures […]
Posted in Education, Market Failures on Dec 1st, 2010
I am sympathetic to the argument that “we” do not produce higher education very well because of the increasing and high costs of attending and producing “higher education.” I am especially sympathetic because I see lots of what happens here. But this view of higher education is too narrow. If what “we” were selling to […]
Posted in Education on Apr 8th, 2010
Right? Wrong. In E.G. West’s Education and the State, we learn that (HT to David Henderson in his excellent Joy of Freedom): Thomas Malthus, one of Earth’s original doomsdayers worried about population growth, was miffed at how widespread the sales of Thomas Paine’s the Rights of Man were. In England, with a population of 10 […]
Posted in Education, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Mar 24th, 2010
… then why have so many government schools worked so hard to try to remove the visible signs of their “publicness?” For example, the largest public college system in the country is the SUNY system. SUNY stands for what exactly? Let me help. It stands for the STATE University of New York. This is not […]
Posted in Disingenuous, If I Really Hated the Poor ..., Institutions, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Apr 30th, 2015
Among the most common ideas I see put forth in regard to the Baltimore rioting is that “the city” has suffered from decades of neglect and that the people of Baltimore have systematically had their environment poisoned (e.g. lead paint and dirty soils), their housing crumbled (e.g. large swaths of vacated and abandoned buildings) and […]
Posted in Economic Illiteracy, If I Really Hated the Poor ..., Politics, Regulation, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Dec 9th, 2013
Last week, former CEA Chair and current Harvard economist Greg Mankiw points us to yet another rhetorical flourish by the Commander in Speech: The CEA Fact Checkers Miss One In his speech yesterday, President Obama said, Now, we all know the arguments that have been used against a higher minimum wage. Some say it actually hurts low-wage […]
Posted in Education, Entrepreneurs on Sep 19th, 2011
Marcus Winters contributes to the growing literature demonstrating that K12 teacher effectiveness has nothing to do with their credentials: Modern research on teacher quality makes clear that the factors used to determine a teacher’s compensation tell us little to nothing about how well the teacher will perform in the classroom. That consistent finding has (or […]
