Homines libenter quod volunt credunt
Posted in You Can't Have it Both Ways on Feb 24th, 2012
the industrial union thugs 100 years ago, and now we have educational union thugs: parents whose children are stuck in failing public schools. If more than 50% sign a petition, they can force a school closed, shake up its administration, or turn it into a charter … The first parent trigger was pulled in December […]
Posted in Health Care on Dec 13th, 2011
I thought one reason to be part of a union was so that you could bargain for more attractive wage and benefit packages than you might be able to on your own? And doesn’t research suggest that the union compensation premium is at least 15% over non-union workers when properly controlling for other factors? Then […]
Posted in Central Planning, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Dec 8th, 2011
We don’t need both bank reserve requirements and Federal Deposit Insurance. The reason to have either is to protect depositors in times of liquidity shocks to the banks they are members of. What kind of a signal does the existence of both send to us? Well, it tells us that the banking regulators do not […]
Posted in Development, Inequality, Voluntary Society on Nov 15th, 2011
Just finished a book called Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills that Shaped the American Economy. I was uninspired by the book, but it did contain several interesting histories of companies such as Kohler, Hormel, Corning and Hershey that people may find useful. One theme that is woven throughout the book, but not […]
Posted in Voluntary Society on Nov 13th, 2011
And folks wonder why I am less charitable to folks today than I used to be: Robert and Patricia Haynes live in Michigan with their two adult children, who have cerebral palsy. The state government provides the family with insurance through Medicaid, but also treats them as caregivers. For the SEIU, this makes them public […]
Posted in incentives on Aug 7th, 2011
The Endangered Species Act is infamous for the perverse incentives built into it (these come from the fact that it imposes costs on a very small minority of people for something that is presumably a national or global public good, but this is not surprising in our modern thugocracy). But here is another perverse incentive […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 28th, 2011
No comment necessary today.
Posted in Market Failures, You Can't Have it Both Ways on Feb 24th, 2011
An interesting argument came up among students of mine recently. They are talking among themselves about the justification for allowing a closed shop. A closed-shop is perhaps the most objectionable and coercive aspect of unionization. Sure, people ought to have the right to associate and bargain collectively for compensation with an employer, but from that […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 20th, 2010
Carter, a linebacker for the 1989 University of Miami Hurricanes and former 10th round draft choice of the Dallas Cowboys, continued to work during the strike in order to support his family, despite the objections of union officials. After Rod Carter appeared on the evening news to explain why he did not support the strike, […]
Posted in trade on May 12th, 2010
One of the great myths perpetuated on high school students in History classes is that unions were formed by concerned workers in order to protect themselves from the vicious capitalists of the day. We’ll explore the claim of exploitation in a future post. For now, let’s start by recognizing a simple micro-economic insight: relative prices […]