Behold: The Recovery Is At Hand.
Posted: October 31, 2009 Filed under: GDP, Stimulus, Uncategorized Leave a comment »Behold: The Recovery Is At Hand.
Teaching Your Kids About Taxes: Halloween Edition
Posted: October 31, 2009 Filed under: Taxes Leave a comment »http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEI9z_hSGIQ
HT: Dr. Horpedahl ( http://www.jeremyhorpedahl.com/ )
Just in Time For Halloween, Walmart (and Costco) Start Selling Caskets!
Posted: October 30, 2009 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Sent to you via Google Reader
Just in Time For Halloween, Walmart (and Costco) Start Selling Caskets!
Oh, it’s fang-tastic! Just in
time for Halloween, discount retail giants Walmart and Costco
just
started selling caskets, a (seriously) major
breakthrough for customers in one of the most
protectionist industries ever. Check
out some details on how the racket works from this
interview with Chip Mellor, the head of the Institute for
Justice, which defended a free market in coffins.
And check out Walmart’s
selection here.
Daniel J. SmithSent Via Mobile Phone
How the FDA Caused Recent Vaccine-Supply Problems
Posted: October 30, 2009 Filed under: FDA, Health Care, Health Insurance, Regulation Leave a comment »http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_09_1_2_foulkes.pdf
Horwitz on Executive Pay
Posted: October 30, 2009 Filed under: Executive Pay, Financial Crisis, Financial Regulation Leave a comment »http://www.pbs.org/nbr/blog/2009/10/government_meddling_in_bank_ex.html
Bone Marrow Markets
Posted: October 30, 2009 Filed under: Organ Markets Leave a comment »http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/10/markets_in_everything_bone_mar.php
Average Tax Rate
Posted: October 30, 2009 Filed under: Taxes Leave a comment »http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/10/average-marginal-tax-rate.html
Demand Curves Slope Downward: Japanese Universal Health Insurance Edition
Posted: October 30, 2009 Filed under: Health Care, Health Insurance Leave a comment »“Facing price caps in the covered sector but competitive prices in these “superfluous” sectors, the most talented doctors disproportionately shift into the “superfluous” sectors and there invest heavily in their expertise: cosmetic surgeons are more likely than other doctors (more likely even than noncosmetic plastic surgeons) to have attended a more selective medical school, to have served on a medical school faculty, to be board certified, and to earn high incomes.”
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/592005
Munger on GDP
Posted: October 29, 2009 Filed under: GDP, Stimulus Leave a comment »http://mungowitzend.blogspot.com/2009/10/omg-its-gdp.html
“Seriously, all we did was blow up G like a giant helium flying saucer, with no balloon boy in it. The 3.5% “growth” is fake. It’s all G. Ask yourself: why is this a “jobless recovery?” Why aren’t consumers going back to the stores, if this is a real recovery? Answer: it is NOT a real recovery.”
Professor Roberts Testifying Before Congress on Executive Pay and Bailouts
Posted: October 29, 2009 Filed under: Bailout, Executive Pay, Financial Crisis, Financial Regulation Leave a comment »Skip to 1:01:36
UN Blowback: More Than 650 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims
Posted: October 28, 2009 Filed under: Global Warming Leave a comment »Report: Antarctic Ice Growing, Not Shrinking
Posted: October 28, 2009 Filed under: Global Warming Leave a comment »http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,517035,00.html
Stossel Gets It — Freedom Works Even in Difficult Situations
Posted: October 28, 2009 Filed under: Economic Freedom Leave a comment »Sent to you via Google Reader
Stossel Gets It — Freedom Works Even in Difficult Situations
|
German Study Shows Green Energy Comes at a High Cost
Posted: October 28, 2009 Filed under: Environment, Uncategorized Leave a comment »Sent to you via Google Reader
German Study Shows Green Energy Comes at a High Cost
The Political Economy of Aid Optimism or Pessimism
Posted: October 27, 2009 Filed under: Foreign Aid Leave a comment »The Political Economy of Aid Optimism or Pessimism
Bob Higgs: Partisan Politics—A Fool’s Game for the Masses
Posted: October 27, 2009 Filed under: Democracy, Voting Leave a comment »http://www.independent.org/blog/?p=3596
New at Reason: Greg Beato on Censorship and Extreme Pornography
Posted: October 27, 2009 Filed under: Patneralism Leave a comment »New at Reason: Greg Beato on Censorship and Extreme Pornography
What the Secretary of Transportation Has to Say About My Car Seat Research
Posted: October 27, 2009 Filed under: Consumer Safety 1 Comment »What the Secretary of Transportation Has to Say About My Car Seat Research
Net Neutrality: Battle of the Corporate Titans
Posted: October 26, 2009 Filed under: Net-Neutrality, Uncategorized Leave a comment »Net Neutrality: Battle of the Corporate Titans
A Nice Teaching Tool for Money and Banking
Posted: October 26, 2009 Filed under: Federal Reserve, Uncategorized Leave a comment »A Nice Teaching Tool for Money and Banking
iPhone Altruism for Potential Organ Donors
Posted: October 26, 2009 Filed under: Organ Markets, Uncategorized Leave a comment »iPhone Altruism for Potential Organ Donors
Posted: October 24, 2009 Filed under: Federal Communications Commission Leave a comment »
This is from the Act that created the Federal Communications Commission. It’s a good demonstration of how rhetoric is employed by politicians to assuage the fear of the public in order to get a bill passed and then is suddenly transformed into precisely what the citizens feared (other fine examples include the income tax and the financial stimulus package). The record of history is crystal clear in showing us that each expansion of government power, no matter how noble, and no matter how hard we try to legally constrain it, will be abused.
“Nothing in this Act shall be understood or construed to give the licensing authority the power of censorship over the radio communications or signals transmitted by any radio station, and no regulation or condition shall be promulgated or fixed by the licensing authority which shall interfere with the right of free speech by means of radio communications.”
From R. Coase’s paper that I was alerted to by Professor Boettke
http://austrianeconomists.typepad.com/weblog/2009/10/50-years-of-coasean-brilliance.html
Learning to Love Insider Trading
Posted: October 24, 2009 Filed under: Insider Trading Leave a comment »http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704224004574489324091790350.html
National Defense is Not a Public Good
Posted: October 24, 2009 Filed under: National Defense Leave a comment »http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/10/a_simple_proof.html
The eco-pawprint of a pet dog is twice that of a 4.6-litre Land Cruiser driven 10,000 kilometres a year
Posted: October 23, 2009 Filed under: Environment Leave a comment »http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/national/2987821/Save-the-planet-eat-a-dog
Iran’s Harshest Sentence for an Innocent Scholar
Posted: October 22, 2009 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »Sent to you via Google Reader
Iran’s Harshest Sentence for an Innocent Scholar
Haleh Esfandiari
Kian Tajbakhsh speaking in August at a trial of dozens of opposition protestors in Tehran (Houshang Hadi/Iranian Labor News Agency, via Associated Press)
For me Iran’s sentencing this week of Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh to at least 12 years in prison—the harshest sentence so far passed down by the revolutionary court—is particularly fraught. In 2007, he and I were fellow prisoners in Tehran’s Evin Prison. He was held in the men’s section and I in the women’s section of Ward 209, reserved for political prisoners held by Iran’s Intelligence Ministry. We had been arrested within a day of each other, and we shared, in separate interrogation rooms, the same interrogators. He began to send me books; thanks to him I was able to escape the confines of my prison cell by reading the novels of Dostoevsky and Graham Greene.
Now, on October 20, Kian has been convicted, on the kind of fantastical charges beloved of Iran’s revolutionary courts—everything from plotting a “velvet revolution” in Iran to espionage and undermining the credibility of the Islamic Republic. He was even charged with endangering the security of the state by belonging to a public email list, Gulf2000 (which posts news and commentary on the Middle East), run by Columbia University professor Gary Sick, who is falsely identified in the indictment as a CIA operative.
Kian was one of over 100 Iranians placed in the dock in a following the demonstrations that brought a million protestors into the streets following June’s contested and almost certainly rigged presidential election.
The accusations we are hearing against the accused today are remarkably similar to those against both Kian and me back in 2007: plotting with the U.S. or unnamed “foreigners” to bring about a “velvet revolution” in Iran—I as the director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, (I was in Iran visiting my mother when I was arrested) and he as a Tehran-based consultant to the Soros Foundation on public health projects. The Intelligence Ministry, I discovered, is obsessed with the activities of George Soros. As my interrogators often reminded me, Soros is a Jew and responsible, they firmly believed, for the velvet revolutions that overthrew regimes in Georgia, Ukraine, Tajikistan and other republics of the former Soviet empire. Soros and the American government, they insisted, were plotting a similar “velvet revolution” for Iran using me and Kian as their witting or unwitting ins…
Daniel J. SmithSent Via Mobile Phone
Yes, Mr. President A Free Market Can Fix Health Care
Posted: October 22, 2009 Filed under: Health Care, Health Insurance, Health Savings Accounts Leave a comment »http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa650.pdf
We Have Come A Long Way
Posted: October 22, 2009 Filed under: Constitution, Constitutionalism, Uncategorized Leave a comment »Sent to you via Google Reader
We Have Come A Long Way
by Mario Rizzo
This is more an intellectual experiment than a normal post. What I am asking you to do is to clear your mind of its cobwebs. Just “marvel” at the contrast between the classic statements of the limits of the federal government and the recent report in the Wall Street Journal:
“The U.S. pay czar will cut in half the average compensation for 175 employees at firms receiving large sums of government aid, with the vast majority of salaries coming in under $500,000, according to people familiar with the government’s plans.
As expected, the biggest cut will be to salaries, which will drop by 90% on average. Kenneth Feinberg, the Treasury Department’s special master for compensation, also intends to demand a host of corporate governance changes at those firms.”
I am not here concerned with whether this is a good idea but I am simply in a state of naïve wonderment that we got to the point where this is legally possible.
Consider now the classic limited-government statements:
1. Powers given to Congress: “To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.” (U.S. Constitution, Article I, sec.8, emphasis added.)
Comment: The list contains no reference to bailouts or pay czars.
2. “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” (U.S. Constitution, Tenth Amendment)
3. James Madison, the Father of our Constitution, clarified the authority of the federal government in the Federalist Papers #45: “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined.”
I know the constitutional history but sometime you just can’t believe it.
This is the world we lost.
Posted in Bailouts, law, political philosophy Tagged: enumerated powers, James Madison, limited powers, U.S. Constitution 
Daniel J. SmithSent Via Mobile Phone
Prohibition Links
Posted: October 22, 2009 Filed under: Drugs, Prohibition Leave a comment »Miron, Jeffrey A. “Some Estimates of Annual Alcohol Consumption Per Capita, 1870-1991,” ISP Discussion Paper #69, Department of Economics, Boston University, 1996.
Miron, Jeffrey A. “The Effect of Alcohol Prohibition on Alcohol Consumption.” NBER Working Paper No. 7130, 1997.
http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/miron.prohibition.alcohol
Miron, Jeffrey A. “Violence and the U.S. Prohibitions of Drugs and Alcohol,” American Law and Economics Review 1-2 (1999): 78-114.
Miron, Jeffrey A. “Violence, Guns, and Drugs: A Cross-Country Analysis.” Manuscript, Boston University, 2001.
Miron, Jeffrey A. and Jeffrey Zwiebel. “Alcohol Consumption During Prohibition.” American Economic Review 81, no. 2 (1991): 242-247.
Miron, Jeffrey A. and Jeffrey Zwiebel. “The Economic Case against Drug Prohibition.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 9, no. 4 (1995): 175-192.
