Potpourri
==> In the latest Lara-Murphy Show, Carlos and I respond to a research note from a brokerage firm that had wondered whether passive investing were worse than Marxism. (We said no.)
==> Brittany Hunter explains that “private prisons” in today’s America are not the same thing as Rothbardian privatization of judicial and police services.
==> David R. Henderson has been posting some great stuff over at EconLog, on topics such as carbon tax, the FDA’s corrupt crackdown on e-cigs (which shows how having the FDA actively makes people less healthy), and the nationalization of U.S. mortgages.
==> THE BEST post on the EpiPen stuff comes from Scott Alexander. Don’t just skim the beginning and assume you’ve got it; you need to read the whole thing to fully appreciate its beauty.
==> Incidentally, I got the link to that Alexander post from Scott Sumner. In Sumner’s post, besides giving the link to that great article, he also offers the following gem. Can people understand why the following sounds funny/ironic to me?
PS. Alex Tabarrok linked to an excellent Scott Alexander post that exposes the progressive tendency to respond to every failure of regulation with a call for more regulation. I see an analogy with fiscal stimulus. Instead of asking central banks to do more (the obvious solution) they propose dubious schemes to try to use fiscal policy to make up for the failures of monetary policy.
>> Can people understand why the following sounds funny/ironic to me?
Yup!
Progressives are actually just talking about having a nice, steady growth in directly observable regulating.
If the people want more regulations that just sit there dormant and not acted upon, it is a signal for the government to introduce more regulations so that the effective rate of regulating grows at a nice steady pace.
You cannot seriously be against this, I mean, what would happen if tomorrow the regulating halved? Tons of people would lose their jobs, because of stickiness in reaction times. You don’t want another Hitler do you? God I hate ideologues.
We also would have accepted, “The stance of fiscal policy is incredibly tight, because NGDP is not growing at the target rate. If you think that’s a dangerous definition, let’s think about a guy steering a cruise ship.”
You know where else a guy will be steering a…. Never mind.
This is kind of interesting, about “Market Failures”.
I think he gets a lot of stuff wrong, but very instructive to pay close attention to how he gets it wrong. Starts by talking about Pareto Optional situations, and then by the end is sneaking in concepts like “Socially Optimal” which he never defined and which most certainly is not the same as “Pareto Optimal”.
https://youtu.be/Nxy_IBom7lo
Anyway, that’s the what is getting out there… free speech, free market in ideas.
Thanks for the plug.
“Instead of asking central banks to do more (the obvious solution) they propose dubious schemes to try to use fiscal policy to make up for the failures of monetary policy.”
aka
“Instead of asking central banks to do more (the obvious solution) they ask central banks to do more.”