Michael Giberson In the Christian Science Monitor, Robert Rapier wishes for a stable energy policy. It is an attractive idea. After all, policy uncertainty plays havoc with the ability of investors, managers, workers and consumers to coordinate plans in ways that usually work to make us all better off. He provides three examples–the production tax credit …
Not Your Grandfather’s Dysfunctional Energy Policy Read More »
Michael Giberson “Get the prices right!” was the rallying cry of some economists in the aftermath of the break up of the Soviet Union. Don’t plan the transition, stop planning and let markets sort it out. Similar advice goes out to developing economies around the world. Don’t ease your way to liberalization, throw open the …
Adam Smith Opposes “Shock Therapy” for Developing and Transitioning Economies Read More »
Michael Giberson Some techniques for checking the tendency toward extreme partisanship, which can be a ready source of intellectual errors (source): •Take opposing points of view at face value. It is more comfortable to treat opposing points of view reductively. That is, rather than deal with a different viewpoint, we prefer to explain it away. …
If you must subsidize energy, subsidize wisely. Given the way public policy gets made, subsidizing wisely is much harder than you might think.
Michael Giberson Venezuela “President” Hugo Chávez has put his government strongly behind efforts to combat price gouging, which in this context means selling a good for more than the government’s permitted price. The policy has had the usual effects: shortages of ordinary consumer goods and queues reminiscent of Soviet-style communism. The New York Times reports, …
Great Strides Have Been Made Combating Price Gougers in Venzuela Read More »
Michael Giberson SMBC on the president and the economy: [HT to Rick Weber for the heads up.]
Michael Giberson Five minutes of Matt Zwolinski on price gouging (from Learn Liberty). [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9QEkw6_O6w] If you think price gouging should be against the law, watch this video. Are you persuaded by Zwolinski? Let me know in the comments. MORE: Zwolinski has written serious philosophical works on price gouging,which makes the clarity of his position in …
Zwolinski: “Is Price Gouging Immoral? Should It Be Illegal?” Read More »
Michael Giberson Steve Mufson at the Washington Post reports: President Obama proposed measures Tuesday to step up oversight of energy markets and boost by tenfold the penalties for market manipulation, in an effort to blunt political pressure over the 20 percent increase in gasoline prices since the beginning of the year. [Links in source.] Not that the administration has …
Michael Giberson Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal carried an essay by Austan Goolsbee in which he advocates reducing the size of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Even better, he suggests a rule by which the SPR could be managed in a transparent fashion: aim to be able to replace 90 days worth of imports from non-North American …
Reducing the Size of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve Read More »
Michael Giberson In general, in public policy analysis, you’d like to judge ultimate success or failure of a program by its net results, by actual benefits less the costs involved in achieving those benefits. Admittedly sometimes benefits are hard to measure, but ultimately the point of a policy change is to bring about some improvement …
Measuring Success by How Much You Spent on the Program: A Renewable Energy Example Read More »
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