In the same post, AtlanticBlog mentions Thomas Sowell on economic and demographic change in California. Sowell asks this question: After years — indeed, generations — of being a magnet for people and businesses, California is now exporting both, including particularly young people. Why? His hypothesis: One reason is that California’s politicians are following a strategy …
Bastiat Should Be Required Reading
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 …
Pascal On Proof And Custom
I’ve forgotten to check Eric Rasmusen’s blog lately, and in revisiting there this morning I noticed his interesting post on Pascal, proof and custom. The passage he chose to quote, from Pensees, is striking, and not something that I’ve typically associated with Pascal: For we must not misunderstand ourselves; we are as much automatic as …
Rauch On Spam
Jonathan Rauch has a typically good column on spam and ways to deal with it. He recommends what I think is the best approach: that we have property rights in our email inbox! The spam problem, though new in form, is an instance of a very old and familiar dilemma, which economists often call the …
Link to Rss Feed
OK, for those of you who use aggregators, here’s the address of my RSS feed: http://knowledgeproblem.blogspot.com/rss/knowledgeproblem.xml
Working On A New Paper: Environmental Regulation And
I’ve also been working to get a paper out for the International Society for New Institutional Economics conference in September. This paper is the first in a new project on how the petroleum refining industry responds to regulatory change, so this paper essentially lays out the conceptual argument and marks out the path that I …
Working On A New Paper: Environmental Regulation And Read More »
Where Have I Been?
This is not an existential question, but rather an opening to discuss my recent sporadic posting. I spent the weekend at a Liberty Fund conference on constitutionalism directed by my good friend Georg Vanberg. It was a real treat to think about and discuss issues of constitutionalism with some of the most esteemed political scientists …
New Source Review: A New Volley Begins
The states of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut have won an Ohio court ruling that Ohio Edison, a First Energy company, violated the Clean Air Act. How did they do so? By making improvements that, the decision finds, nullified their being grandfathered out of new source review. The suits against Ohio Edison, a subsidiary …
Vive Le Dirigisme!
I love the header in this Economist (subscription) article on the proposed French government subsidy of Alstom: The French, it seems, have no word for laissez-faire. Beautiful!