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My great colleague Walter Williams reviews Universal Economics – a new edition of the greatest economics textbook ever written [2]. A slice:
The authors give a long list of erroneous beliefs that people hold. Here’s a tiny sample: Employers pay for employer-provided insurance; larger incomes for some people require smaller incomes for others; minimum wage legislation helps the unskilled and minorities; foreign imports reduce the number of domestic jobs; “equal pay for equal work” laws aid women, minorities, and the young; labor unions protect the natural brotherhood and collective well-being of workers against their natural enemies, employers; and we cannot compete in a world in which most foreign wages are lower than wages paid to domestic workers.
Deirdre McCloskey asks “what’s still right with the Austrian school of economics? [3]” A slice:
Austrian price theory, Peter [Boettke] notes, was “especially in the hands of Mises and Hayek, institutional in nature: they placed a priority on the framework within which economic life takes place.” But also on ethics. “An institutional framework of property, contract and consent, is a fundamental pre-requisite for the operation of prices and profit-and-loss. Prices guide, profits lure, and losses discipline within the competitive entrepreneurial market process.”
Vanessa Brown Calder issues an important warning about government paid-leave benefits [4].
Alexander C.R. Hammond celebrates Edward Jenner [5].
Scott Sumner wisely counsels humility in matters of foreign policy [6].
Bill Shughart and Arthur Wardle aren’t impressed by Trump’s ethanol plans [7].
Richard Salsman warns of fallout from trade wars [8].