The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
What de Botton captures so artfully is how important work is to our lives. The paychecks pass through our fingers; where the money goes we can’t remember. But we remember all of our jobs.
Does Loose Monetary Policy Cause Economic Growth?
At the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s annual economic symposium, held in Jackson Hole, Wyoming on August 21, 2009, Ben Bernanke expressed satisfaction with the action that his administration undertook to save the financial system. According to Bernanke,
History is full of examples in which the policy responses to financial crises have been slow and inadequate, often resulting ultimately in greater economic damage and increased fiscal costs.
Penalties for Music Piracy
This blogger demonstrates that the penalties are higher for downloading music online than for child abduction, stealing actual CDs, robbing and mugging someone, setting someone’s house on fire, stalking, and even murdering in a 2nd class way.
Left-Libertarians on Rothbardian Abandonment
In Chartier’s Conscience of an Anarchist I mention an interview law professor and libertarian Gary Chartier gave.
The Porn Bust
Pornography is everywhere. The great irony here is that many in that business don’t like it this way. Faced with an economic bust combined with unstoppable pirating, they gone from riches to rags.
The Government’s Cooked Books
A distinguishing feature of a credit instrument is that it cannot be owned by the debtor it would otherwise bind. Yet the United States handles its accounts in just this way.
Universal Coverage Means Suppressing Human Choice
To derive a measurement for efficiency is both theoretically absurd and practically impossible. Economists don’t know which quantities, prices, production processes, and types of employment are efficient.
Rothbardianism In Iraq?
At my blog Free Advice, a Marine reservist who spent time in Iraq describes a post-Saddam village that is on the borderline between a very limited government and a real-world example of anarcho-capitalism. Basically, in the comments the readers who are anarchists think it is an example of anarchy, while those who say “anarchy is unstable” obviously disagree.
Economists on Strike?
The phrase “unintended consequences” attributes ignorance to the actions of union members. In large part, for many, including these unionized economists, the consequences must be intended.
The Irrelevance of the Impossibility of Anarcho-Libertarianism
A 1982 article, The Impossibility of anarcho-capitalism, was recently called to my attention. In it, the author, one Tony Hollick, argues that the “components” of anarcho-capitalism are:
