Another Earth Hour has come and gone. So what can we learn from the fourth iteration of this event?
Earth Hour is a drain on resources. This is true since, if it were otherwise, companies that participated in the event would continue the practice of lights off after the event. So, clearly, the tangible costs of switching off lights are greater than the tangible benefits.
[Excerpted from For a New Liberty (1973)]
The only reason this nonsense is sustainable is due to the promise of the Federal Reserve to back all this spending with money creation.
I just read a fascinating paper, “Law and Economics, David Hume and Intellectual Property,” by Scottish law professor Hector Lewis MacQueen.1 MacQueen argues that Hume probably would not have recognized IP as a form of
As reported by ABC News, what started out as a program to hold unclaimed property, such as the contents of safety deposit boxes owned by people who have moved away without a forwarding address, has gone wildly out of control. The program is now using the flimsiest of excuses to drill safe deposit boxes and sell the contents, often for below-market value, the proceeds going to the state’s general revenue.
What if this law in the state of Utah catches on? What if people started to price goods and services on the basis that $20 equals an ounce of gold?
The stimulating methodological controversy between Professors Machlup and Hutchison proves that there are sometimes more than two sides to every question.1 In many ways, the two are debating at cross-purposes: Professor Hutchison is primarily tilting against the methodological (and political) views of Professor Ludwig von Mises; his most serious charge is that P
Rhodes hosted a speaker from the anti-sweatshop movement on Wednesday night; I wasn’t able to attend because I was giving an Econ 100 exam, but after conversations with a few students, it sounds like the talk was pretty predictable: sweatshop conditions are terrible, the wages are low, isn’t it unconscionable that Nike pays its executives so much and sweatshop workers so little, multinationals earn enormous profits and can afford to pay more, the argument that closing sweatshops will push poor people into starvation or prostitutio
