Lynne Kiesling The history of the commercialization of the ice market is a multi-layered case study in market processes. Who knew? This Freeman article from David Hebert, an economics graduate student at George Mason University, tells the economic history of the origins of the long-distance ice industry in the U.S. in the early 19th century: …
Lynne Kiesling Matt Ridley helpfully points out something that’s grossly underappreciated in the sturm und drang over financial market competition and regulation in the past five years — the lessons of evolutionary biology apply to human-designed systems too, including financial market institutions and regulatory institutions: What is the cure? A change of personnel will not …
Lynne Kiesling Big Think and the John Templeton Foundation have collaborated on a series of short videos about free markets and their consequences and implications. I found Tyler Cowen’s video contribution to the series particularly valuable and pretty much right about the morality of voluntary exchange, how exchange embodies cooperation, globalization, etc. I intend to …
Lynne Kiesling Friday night’s PBS Newshour had a feature story on the protests in California over the installation of digital electricity meters in the PG&E distribution monopoly service territory. These protests focus on two separate issues: one is a claim that the wireless communications from the meters create electromagnetic fields that harm health, and the …
Lynne Kiesling Seth Goldman is one of the entrepreneurial founders of the beverage company Honest Tea, which makes fresh-brewed, organic, low-sugar teas and sells them in a global industry standard bottle: 500ml, or 16.9 ounces. You’d think that such an entrepreneurial activity and such a beverage would be attractive even to Nanny Mayor Michael Bloomberg. …
Bloomberg’s Bureaucratic “Big Gulp” Rule, More Unintended Costs Read More »
Lynne Kiesling I’ve scheduled this to post while I’m out on one of my long rides … this interesting Outside magazine article explores why women’s sports attract so little attention. The article focuses on cycling: The Giro d’Italia Femminile is the biggest race you’ve never heard of. Covering 961.4 kilometers of Italian countryside over nine days, 127 …
Lynne Kiesling Consider the preconceptions that surface in your mind when you read the name “Enron”. What are they? Chances are that they are negative, and not particularly nuanced — fraudulent business activity, tarnishing the idea of free markets by trying to manipulate them using the political process, and so on. If that’s true for …
Lynne Kiesling In the wake of the “you didn’t build that” discussions of the past few days, David Brooks writes The Romney campaign doesn’t seem to know how to respond. For centuries, business leaders have been inept when writers, intellectuals and politicians attacked capitalism, and, so far, the Romney campaign is continuing that streak. One …
Romney Should Defend the Morality of Capitalism … Here’s an Example Read More »
Lynne Kiesling If you’re a Direct TV subscriber, you know that they are embroiled in a contract dispute with Viacom over subscriber fees, which means you haven’t been able to watch Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert or SpongeBob SquarePants for the past week or so. But is cable/satellite TV becoming an “if it died would …
Lynne Kiesling [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJeuoMh46JY&feature=player_embedded] Matt Zwolinski’s new Learn Liberty video addresses that question, and he does a masterful job of it. He starts with the “compared to what?” question — what’s the likely alternative to voluntary exchange in free markets? It’s regulated and politicized exchange, which is frequently not voluntary. Ask yourself: which of these is …
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