Cory Iacono outlines five economic myths that won’t die. (HT Thomas Boudreaux)
George Will details the audacity, tortured legal reasoning, power-mongering, and interest-group greed that are behind a move to kill school choice in Wisconsin. Here’s Will’s closing paragraph:
The good news is that Washington is bludgeoning Wisconsin with a legal theory too cynical to succeed. The bad news is that the bigger government becomes, the bolder it becomes in bullying people with legal complexities, confident that its nastiness will rarely be noticed because there is simply too much government to monitor.
Matt Ridley explains that environmentalists are no friends of the poor.
My colleague Bryan Caplan ponders the complexity of the world. (I pick one very small nit: Bryan writes that “Imposing a price ceiling on food doesn’t just make food cheaper…. ” and then goes on to explain the damage done by such price ceilings. The nit I pick is that price ceilings in fact don’t even make food cheaper. Price ceilings on food make food more expensive: by reducing the amount of food sellers bring to market, food becomes more precious; as a result it’s marginal value rises; people then compete to acquire it by spending, in total, an amount of resources – including time waiting in queues – that is greater than they would have spent had no price ceilings been in place.)
Speaking of the pernicious effects of price controls, Sarah Skwire has more.
Ben Zycher is unimpressed with Jonathan Gruber’s economics. A slice:
Economists may disagree about many things, but absent among them is the central role of incentives as determinants of behavior, an eternal truth that applies fully to government. In the context of ObamaCare, government has interest groups rather than patients, and dollars not spent on a given constituency can be spent on others. Accordingly, government as a buyer of medical goods and services — or as a rule-maker for the ObamaCare exchanges and the insurers participating in them — has incentives to opt for lower-priced alternatives over higher-priced ones in ways that do not reflect the incremental advantages of the latter, if any. In particular, the drive to reduce explicit budget costs — to claim that the ACA is producing efficiencies — biases choices in favor of current budget savings at the expense of benefits enjoyed by the beneficiaries of a given program, even relative to the decisions that patients would make if confronted with the full costs of their choices. That the CBO estimates of budget costs themselves are biased by an expansion of price controls, whether explicit or implicit, makes matters worse by exacerbating the confusion of budget outlays with true resource costs. Nor does Gruber make any adjustment for the inefficiency costs (“excess burden”) of the tax system used to pay for expanded public insurance programs.
