15 Dec 2014

Tom Woods and I Dissect an Article Complaining About Cheap Gas

Oil, Shameless Self-Promotion, Tom Woods 6 Comments

For your listening convenience I’ve embedded the video below, but go to Tom’s show notes for all the relevant links, both to the offending article and to the other information Tom and I brought up during the interview.

6 Responses to “Tom Woods and I Dissect an Article Complaining About Cheap Gas”

  1. Enopoletus Harding says:

    I miss the days of $1.60 per gallon gasoline back in late 2008. Those days were so good (at least, for me, not for those getting laid off). I felt my real income rising every day.
    http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/GASREGCOVW

  2. Enopoletus Harding says:

    Currently in Japan: $6/gallon; Turkey: $8/gallon; Italy: $9.50/gallon; Norway pays more than $10 a gallon, and they’re one of the happiest nations on Earth

    -Rule #1 in welfare economics: in a Friedmanite floating currency system, prevailing exchange rates have no relevance to welfare. All these places have hugely overvalued nominal current-dollar GDPs per capita.

    • Enopoletus Harding says:

      That SFGate article is surely 100% clickbait; no one with more than two nerve cells could take it seriously as a work of fact.

      • Enopoletus Harding says:

        Ha! From a comment there:

        Ever been to Norway? Besides $10 gas, they have free, top quality education for all, including graduate programs, free healthcare, low crime, few illegals, few regressive types, and few of the other societal ills found in the “you’re-on-your-own” soceity.

        -Brought to you by Statoil. Also, kinda hard to have illegals when not an E.U. member and surrounded entirely by ice and sea.

    • Jan Masek says:

      I am not sure if it is apples to apples. UK gallon is bigger than US gallon and gas quality is generally higher in Europe, I think. The same car should have quite significantly lower consumption on Europe gasoline (I think).

  3. Tel says:

    Good stuff, Tom Woods and Bob Murphy make a great team. If you want to set your sights a bit higher than beating up tree hugging yoga teachers, the same ideas are better articulated in other (less populist) articles.

    The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good

    Robert H. Frank

    He covers things like how to calculate the size of externalities, in a way that might handwavingly be considered market pricing. Also what “common good” might even mean in an objective sense. It’s all wrong on many levels, but at least you can figure out where some of these ideas are coming from rather than just get struck by how incoherent it all is.

    If you feel debased by buying a book such as this and hence supporting the guy, I have an old copy kicking around I can donate to some institute where students might see it.

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