John Cochrane praises so-called “price gouging.” (HT Kevin Corcoran)
The difference between Milton Friedman and Joseph Stiglitz. (HT HumanProgress.org)
Here’s excellent advice from Vance Ginn: “To grow freely, resist the ‘New Right.'” A slice:
[Oren] Cass claims these policies will benefit workers and domestic industries, yet history and economics tell us otherwise. The New Deal, Great Society, and more recent Obama-Biden policies, all rooted in similar principles, have repeatedly demonstrated the failure of such approaches to deliver sustainable economic growth.
“Dog Bites Man!” “Gravity Still Operational!” A Politician Dissembles and Distorts!. A slice:
Meanwhile, it is doubtful that Walz concerns himself much with the ethics of “women’s reproductive health,” including abortion, since he signed a bill last year that would no longer require doctors to preserve the life of infants who survive abortion. Whereas Minnesota law used to require medical personnel to “preserve the life and health of the born alive infant,” the Walz-approved law says only that doctors “care for the infant who is born alive.”
So “care” can mean “let die,” if one’s conscience permits.
Such deceptive language is the stuff of nightmares and leads to the gulag. Walz’s administration cloaks reality with words that neither offend nor inform. Then he employs soothing love language to justify turning Minnesota into a sanctuary state for children seeking transgender treatments. Everybody is welcome in Minnesota, he says, but he also believes that children, in some cases, should be allowed access to surgical and chemical procedures without the consent of their parents.
On the recommendation of Timothy Taylor, I’m going to read an 1893 paper – originally published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics – by Simon Newcomb. The paper is titled “The Problem of Economic Education.” A slice from Taylor’s blog post:
But here in the US, we are living in a time when proposals to place large limitations on foreign trade are common: I cannot think of a time since Vice President Al Gore defended the North American Free Trade Agreement against the criticism of Ross Perot back in 1993 that a prominent US politician has even tried to make a pro-trade case. There are current proposals to put price limits on everything from rent to pharmaceuticals to groceries are common as well. Politicians often seem to have a hard time making a distinction between the number of jobs, which is not the major issue in a US economy where the unemployment rate has been around 4% for more last two years, and the qualities of those jobs in terms of the wages, benefits, training and opportunities that are emerging from the matches between workers and employers in the labor market. No leading politician is willing to take the idea of “you can’t eat your cake and have it too” and tackle well-known issues like the trendlines to insolvency of Social Security and Medicare, or the need to bring down budget deficits over time.
