Mark Thoma has posted a imaginary dialog between a moderate pro-trade economist and a worker negatively affected by globalization. One segment of the exchange covers the familiar suggestion that, since trade creates more net winners than losers, it should be possible to compensate the losers with a portion of the winners’ gains—and equally familiar riposte […]

[Read more →]

Before the somber beatification begins in earnest, let’s look back at some of the rev’s “greatest hits” as compiled by Voices of American Sexuality: * “AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals” * “It appears that America’s anti-Biblical feminist movement is at last dying, […]

[Read more →]

Dan Klein has a long and interesting Cato Unbound essay that takes as its starting point the somewhat puzzling finding that more than half of economists in a recent survey believed that minimum wage laws were “not coercive in any significant sense.” Klein takes this result to be explained by the negative connotation of the […]

[Read more →]

So, last year around this time, I had a mini dust-up over at Hit and Run with my old pal Andrew Chamberlain about the Tax Foundation’s “Tax Freedom Day“—the national one’s today, if you’re inclined to celebrate—which is supposed to mark the dividing-line in the year between “days Americans work to pay taxes” and “days […]

[Read more →]

Serenity beats out Star Wars for best sci-fi flick of all time. Addendum: Readers, please don’t use my comment section to tout your own blog posts on totally unrelated topics. It’s not really any less spam than the thousand daily comments about Levitra or Texas Hold-Em that MT junks automatically. If you think something you’ve […]

[Read more →]

Lest my decoder ring be revoked for the previous post, let me reply to my friend Micah’s post, which trots out what I’d called a “paint-by-numbers” argument I expect my fellow travelers are as bored of hearing as I am: That a defense of (relatively unregulated) markets in this or that case is (profound sigh) […]

[Read more →]

One more thought on the way we often discuss inequality. You’ll often see folk disturbed by inequality, or the growth thereof, say something along the lines of: “Last year, X percent of the growth in the economy/wealth/wages went to the top Y percent of the population.” Which makes it sound rather as though there’s some […]

[Read more →]

The Washington Post reports that price controls on food in Venezuela have (try not to bruise your jaw on the floor here) led to endemic shortages. But don’t worry, the government knows just how to fix the problem: Government officials dismiss any problems with price controls, while state TV has begun running tickers urging the […]

[Read more →]

I’ve always thought the best argument for worrying about income inequality as such—which is to say, the best of a bad lot—was that wealth disparities tend to get translated into disparities in political power. I’ve also tended to think the best response was to have a government too limited in its economic power to merit […]

[Read more →]

The sun rose today, there was violence in the Middle East, and almost as shocking, Tyler Cowen has lots of insightful things to say—this time in a New York Times column about income inequality. Among the points that make you feel vaguely stupid for not having already thought of it: Without anything else nefarious going […]

[Read more →]