Fill-in-the-Blank Article About Price-Gouging Laws

As surely as summer follows spring, natural disasters are followed by saber rattling about “price gouging,” which is usually defined very lucidly and clearly as an “unconscionable” increase in the price of a necessity. These tend to follow a formula, so I thought that instead of writing a new article discussing the unintended consequences of every price-gouging law that goes into effect after a natural disaster, it would be useful to write a universal, fill-in-the-blank article discussing the economics of price-gouging laws.

Troll Tracker Lands Job Fighting Patent Trolls!

In previous posts (Troll Tracker’s Identity Revealed :( and Troll Tracker [Why People Hate Lawyers]), I discussed threats and bounties put up by patent attorney Ray Niro against the then-anonymous Troll Tracker (who repeatedly highlighted various patent lawsuits Niro was filing), which finally resulted in Troll Tracker being exposed as an in-house patent attorney at Cisco, Rick Frenkel.

What Belongs to Caesar?

Despite the title of the book, Archbishop Chaput leaves the reader without any argument as to why the state has a right to rule over us, why we have a moral obligation to submit to such domination, or why the state possesses the moral authority to extract money from us at the point of a gun. Put in even simpler terms, Archbishop Chaput offers no compelling arguments against those of us who happen to be, in Jerome Tuccille’s words, “sane, moderate, middle-of-the-road anarchist[s].”

Sex, Violence, and the Culture War

One of the fundamental problems in the social sciences is that correlation is not necessarily causation. Unfortunately, correlations are often reported and causality is inferred based on the predispositions of the analyst without adequately accounting for alternative hypotheses. There is nothing intellectually dishonest about this; indeed, empirical research is extremely difficult. However, it should cause us to view claims about causal relationships with some skepticism.

The Downturn Is Good News

Sometimes the bad news is the good news. So it is with the report that retail sales are down by 0.1 percent in July, the sharpest drop in many months.

Why good news? It means that consumers are starting to cut back. They could be going into less debt. They might be saving more. They are being more careful about long-term plans pending short-term trends.

Going for the Heart

The heart of the modern state is the central bank. By heart I mean the very thing that makes it work, and without which the modern state would quickly wither and die. It is the thing that makes the money. As such, it purports to be our stabilizer, our source of employment, the fuel behind the economic growth that brings us technology.

Labor Day and Freedom

It isn’t clear that Labor Day is worth celebrating. According to the US Department of Labor, Labor Day “is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers.” It is also a holiday that is largely grounded in fiction. Part of the traditional narrative of the labor movement is encapsulated in this passage from the US Department of Labor’s website: “The vital force of labor added materially to the highest standard of living and the greatest production the world has ever known and has brought us closer to the realization of our traditional ideals ...”

The Fallacy of We

While watching the Olympics, we tend to cheer participants along national lines. We root for our country’s athletes over those from the rest of the world. While there is nothing wrong with this fun diversion, the concept of the individual must never be lost amid the ideal of the collective — the belief that the members of the collective (the nation in this instance) are faceless automatons dedicated to serving the whole.
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