Lynne Kiesling Steve Horwitz has a great post at the LSE blog that provides an introduction to and summary of the Austrian economic theory that’s relevant to macro policy questions, including the current Eurozone crisis. Most people know that Austrian economics provides a critique of the Keynesian policies emphasizing government stimulus spending, but what’s the …
Lynne Kiesling One quick note before I turn on my Internet-blocking software and retreat to my writing cave: yesterday’s earthquake naturally prompted a lot of snarky comment that the earthquake would at least create jobs … the absurdity of which illustrates Bastiat’s broken window fallacy (a topic of great interest to both of us at …
Michael Giberson Wind power gets a lot of criticism for contributing to bird deaths. Reports of bird-turbine collisions lead some environmentalists to withhold support from wind power. You sometimes see free market advocates, who otherwise seem not to get much concerned over the effects of economic activity on wildlife, suddenly quite concerned about wind power’s …
Lynne Kiesling Wow, I am really glad that Mike and Tyler both posted about that ridiculously stupid USA Today story! One doesn’t need to be an economist to recognize that the broken window fallacy is just that, fallacious. This type of argument is one of my biggest pet peeves, and I actually said to the …
I think Frederic Bastiat was one of the most insightful writers on state power. He starts off his major work, The Law, with a bang in the introduction: If every person has the right to defend even by force-his person, his liberty, and his property, then it follows that a group of men have the …
Farming has always been an uncertain business. Weather and the price-taking nature of being small relative to large commodity markets lead to feast or famine. The Trump Trade War and today’s palliative farm subsidies to farmers harmed by Trump’s tariffs combine with pre-existing subsidies to amplify that underlying boom and bust cycle, imposing high costs on …
Dairy Farming, Tariffs, and Trump’s “12 Billion Dollar Crutches” Read More »
The proposed steel tariff will benefit the steel industry. This is what is seen as a consequence of the steel tariff. What is unseen is the higher prices for goods that use steel, the lower quantity demanded of those goods, and the resulting lost jobs in industries like automobile manufacturing and construction. Bastiat’s “What Is …
Us Steel Reopening Plant and Bringing Back Jobs: Ceo on Trump Tariffs Read More »
Should we make it politically profitable for policymakers to do the right thing, or should we make it less profitable for policymakers to do anything? Abigail Hall, writing a pair of posts for the Independent Institute blog The Beacon, urges liberty-minded people not to get too excited about electing the “right people.” (First post, second) …
Should We Make It Politically Profitable for Policymakers to Do the Right Thing Read More »
John Cochrane’s commentary in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, What To Do When Obamacare Unravels, provides a strong and thoughtful analysis of what a free health care market could look like. In his argument he accomplishes two important tasks: he lays out the extent to which the U.S. health care market is not a free …
Cochrane on Aca’s Unravelling: Parallels to Electricity Read More »
Lynne Kiesling You may have seen the article in Sunday’s New York Times on how “wasteful” data centers are — they use large amounts of electricity to enable the level of redundancy required to achieve the degree of reliability and uptime that consumers expect from their Internet activities. I put the word “waste” in quotes …
Copyright © 2022 Knowledge Problem Archive