Environmentalist groups are, of course, in the same business as the folks who brought you the “Saw” movies. Their fundraising depends on it, and the media rarely go back to fact-check past predictions, instead blustering ahead with the next dire warning.
Speaking of the reality of politics in contrast to its romance, Jeffrey Tucker offers five quick and important lessons. A slice:
Every candidate will speak about his or her vision for America. They talk as if they want to be, can be, will be, in charge of pushing history forward. But look around: the progress you experience in your daily life has nothing to do with the political class. Think about the mobile applications you use to stay in touch with family, find directions in a new city, monitor your health, communicate with your network. These services were not granted by the political class. They came to us via entrepreneurs and enterprise, working themselves out in the course of social evolution.
Megan McArdle is understandably unimpressed with Kevin Drum’s labor economics. (HT Warren Smith) Note: Although this article isn’t about minimum-wage legislation, it (like Kevin Drum, no doubt inadvertently) points to a stubborn fact for those who assert the prevalence in reality of employer monopsony power over low-paid workers. Here’s a quotation from McArdle’s first link, a recent Washington Post report on the increasing difficulty of restaurants to hire cooks; the reality to which this quotation, along with its context, points is highly unlikely to be one plagued by such monopsony power:
[Tyler] Cowen said that he thinks the improving economy is hurting the restaurant industry. As other sectors pick up, service jobs suddenly become less appealing, he said.
