15
Dec
2014
Tom Woods and I Dissect an Article Complaining About Cheap Gas
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.
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
-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.
That SFGate article is surely 100% clickbait; no one with more than two nerve cells could take it seriously as a work of fact.
Ha! From a comment there:
-Brought to you by Statoil. Also, kinda hard to have illegals when not an E.U. member and surrounded entirely by ice and sea.
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).
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.
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.