On Monday morning (April 23, 2018), the Grim Reaper cut down Leland Yeager—a great scholar, collaborator, and friend. I share the sentiments about Leland that have already been expressed by David Gordon, David Henderson, and George Selgin.
Dear Mr. President:
With your July 10 announcement of $200 billion in new tariffs on Chinese goods, doubling down on tariff increases announced earlier, it is clear you seek an aggressive trade war. This is unacceptable treatment for a country with which the United States has increasingly improved relations over a period of almost five decades prior to 2018.
If you fall asleep or use the bathroom during your next flight, those incriminating facts could be added to your federal dossier. Likewise, if you use your laptop or look at noisy children seated nearby with a “cold, penetrating stare,” that may be included on your permanent record. If you fidget, sweat or have “strong body odor” — BOOM! the feds are onto you.
Congratulations to Mises Senior Fellow Peter Klein for being recognized by the Strategic Entrepreneurship Society with its Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal Best Paper Prize for his paper “Opportunity Discovery, Entrepreneurial Action, and Economic Organization.”
One of the aspects that makes this award particularly important is that it recognizes the impact of a paper. As such, papers are not eligible until they have been published for five or more years.
In his column today, Ron Paul mentions that those who insist the Fed functions with “independence” tend to forget — or at least not bring up — the numerous historical episodes in which the Fed did not exercise any such independence.
As an example, Paul mentions the time President Lyndon Johnson
President Trump’s recent Tweets expressing displeasure with the Federal Reserve’s (minor) interest rate increases led to accusations that President Trump is undermining the Federal Reserve’s independence. But, the critics ignore the fact that Federal Reserve “independence” is one of the great myths of American politics.
The latest trend in banning plastic stuff is the nationwide trend toward eliminating plastic straws from restaurants. A commonly-given justification for the ban is the fact that there’s a lot of plastic garbage floating around in the ocean. Of course, this rationale seems a bit odd for some locations. In Fort Collins, Colorado, for example — which is about a thousand miles from any ocean — locals feel the need to “do their part” by convincing local restaurateurs to ban the offending objects.
ABSTRACT: New product R&D, which precedes post-launch production, is a three-stage process. First comes idea prospecting, which leads to working prototypes. Second comes productization—the conversion of working prototypes into manufacturable products with reasonable prospects of being profitable. Thirdly, firms produce pre-launch inventories.
ABSTRACT: In his famous 1970 paper that raised issues about “lemons” problems in markets in which asymmetric information places at least one party to an exchange (usually buyers) at a big disadvantage, George Aklerlof wrote that if dishonesty continues, a “Gresham’s Law” situation can arise in which the bad products will drive good products out of certain markets.
