The idea of the steel tariff is to help one inefficient, bloated, and pampered industry at the expense of all U.S. consumers of steel, including U.S. businesses, and all producers in Europe, Asia, Brazil, and Australia. This brazen protectionism is deeply harmful all around, not to mention morally repugnant.
Every year, hundreds of people donate a kidney or a piece of their liver to a family member or a friend who is in dire need. If payment were allowed, we would see more of this type of activity--and not just from acquaintances--thus saving numerous lives.
If we are to take one lesson from the current state of the world economy--and the geopolitical stresses and ideological divides which reflect this--we should alter the (oft-misquoted) phrase from the second book of Timothy. Rather than holding that "the love of money is the root of all evil," we should all fervently avow that "the existence of dishonest money is the root of all evil."
As the history of America's Great Depression is one long regret of political follies and blunders that aggravated the suffering, so is the story of the Japanese recession from the 1990s to the present. The Japanese government tried to spend its way out of the recession, but instead merely prolonged it and created a mountain of debt.
The custom of tipping is an excellent demonstration of the market's ability to solve real-world problems of dispersed knowledge and transactions costs in order to ensure the maximum satisfaction of consumer preferences. Normally taken for granted, tipping is in fact a beautiful illustration of the power of voluntary, decentralized exchange.
Why shouldn't the worker who is willing to render the best services for the least pay be the one who gets the job? Instinctively, most of us recoil in disgust at the suggestion that wages should reflect nothing more than the cold calculus of supply and demand. Yet few of us realize just how essential this "cold calculus" is for the long-run welfare of laborers themselves.
The energy problems that plague this country are government created. From restrictions on drilling to U.S. foreign policy blunders, the government has been a veritable "bull in a china shop" when it comes to energy policy. Another layer of political action, even when suggested by "free-market economists," will not solve our problems.
In the real world, it is not enough to have demand for goods: one must have the means to accommodate people's desires.
Why would some folks hate globalization as it is properly understood and conceived? Tibor Machan explains.
British economist A.C. Pigou was instrumental in developing the theory of externalities. The theory examines cases where some of the costs or benefits of activities "spill over" onto third parties. When it is a cost that is imposed on third parties, it is called a negative externality. When third parties benefit from an activity in which they are not directly involved, the benefit is called a positive externality. The study of such situations, a part of welfare economics, has been an active area of research since Pigou's efforts early in the twentieth century.
