Malpractice on the Market
A judge in a monopoly public court system faces no financial incentives to be fair and judicious in his rulings. No economic force directs him to rulings whose rewards are commensurate to damages.
Greedy-Bastard Economics
If your landlord or apartment manager hasn’t gotten around to fixing your garbage disposal for weeks, how carefully do you think about why? If you are like many people, you simply blame your landlord or manager
Michael Moore Kills Capitalism with Kool-Aid
Moore truly believes that warehouses of federal workers, in Washington, D.C., remotely running our lives is the optimal plan. He really doesn’t care why the poor are poor or the rich are rich; he just wants it fixed.
The Omelet Has No Rights
March 1955
“Butch,” my young son, was making an omelet one morning and I was supposed to be supervising the project. But my mind was more on the United Nations as a symbol of hope — the hope for universal peace and the protection of human rights.
As Butch broke the eggs into the bowl there came to mind a saying, popular among party men of the Soviet Union:
When you are making an omelet, you must break the eggs.
Mamas, Do Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Barbers
Barbershops everywhere are often the meeting place for downtown businessmen who gather to gossip and talk about current events. Frenchie’s was no different.
Posner on the Precipice
In recent years, Posner abandoned his rational-choice approach in law for what he has been calling “pragmatism.” Keynes also thought of himself as a pragmatic, nondoctrinaire person.
The Lawless State
Today, in the land we like to think of as the most free on earth, governments at all levels reaches into every level of our lives. It controls and it coerces, it bullies and it brags, it browbeats and it blusters.
Patent Lawyers Who Don’t Toe the Line Should Be Punished!
In his post Reality Check: Anti-Patent Patent Musings Simply Bizarre, patent attorney Gene Quinn is baffled that any patent attorney would openly oppose the patent system--or be hired by anyone. He writes, in part:
Loan Mod Fraud
I had missed this excellent story in the NYT by Peter Goodman about the dubious loan modification companies that have emerged out of the mortgage industry. They ask people to cough up money and promise to negotiate for lower rates with lenders. Once they get the money, they vanish.
Broke, The Movie
Broke, a new documentary by Michael Covel, offers an extremely engaging look at what went wrong with the macroeconomy but in a very interesting way: he provides close examinations of several microeconomic sectors that affect the financial well being of the household.
Most impressive is his contemporary history of the housing bust. Most of the energy of the film seems to have been focused on this area, and it is the most successful part of the film. Covel illustrates the vast gulf that separates the promise from the reality.
