After weeks in which Bush administration spokesmen have said that the weak dollar is actually a blessing, Bush has told a Russian TV station: “[T]he marketplace is making decisions as to whether the dollar should be strong or not. Our policy is a strong dollar. And we believe that good fiscal and monetary policy will cause our economy to grow and that the marketplace will see a growing economy and therefore strengthen the dollar...
Is baseball a collectivist sport funded via public coffers? Baseball has huge problems, but in this Economist piece, the author takes up a whole article saying how dare baseball become so anti-competitive, so unfair, and so anti-free market; then he complains that major league baseball, a private association of voluntary participants, is exempt from the government’s anti-trust law. Think he gets it?
Many commentators suggested that oil was the real reason for the war on Iraq. If so, no one anticipated that after the war, US firms would have a hard time gaining access for one simple reason: Iraq is not safe (MSNBC).
A reader has brought to my attention the fact that the second graph in my Daily Article from 6/2 (”Public and Private Welfare Expenditures as Percentage of GDP and Gini Coefficient, 1980-1994”) suggests that private expenditure on welfare was 14% of GDP in 1994. This is clearly an error; there is still an upward trend, but the numbers have been calculated incorrectly. I regret the error, and revised numbers will be available after I return to Saint Louis. Posted by William Art Carden
According to David Malpass writing in National Review Online: “There’s too much concern that the U.S. is heading into deflation. U.S. deflation was a policy problem in the late 1990s and caused the global recession of 2001. However, the U.S. departed sharply from Japan’s deflation path in 2001 and we’re now well into a reflation process. In the U.S. — unlike Japan — the currency retraced its course, real interest rates became negative, and tax rates were cut sharply.”
Bush Urges Free Trade, says a headline on CNN. But it turns out the free trade he supports works a lot like global weflare and mercantilism: “Bush has announced a 50 percent increase in U.S. development aid and pledged $15 billion to fight AIDS, a disease which has decimated the working-age population in some African countries.... The United States plans to sue the European Union unless it quickly opens its market to [genetically modified] products.
Writes Paul Krugman, so sound when not talking about economics:
An administration hypes the threat posed by a foreign power. It talks of links to Islamic fundamentalist terrorism; it warns about a nuclear weapons program. The news media play along, and the country is swept up in war fever. The war drives everything else — including scandals involving administration officials — from the public’s consciousness.
The 1997 movie “Wag the Dog” had quite a plot.
Ramesh Ponnuru writing in National Review Online: “A dissenter from this view is George Selgin, an economist who teaches at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business. Selgin challenges the view, commonly held on the right and in the center, that government should guarantee price stability. When productivity is increasing, he argues, prices should fall.
