Bob Murphy

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Potpourri

==> This debate (hosted by Russ Roberts) on climate change is at once wonderful and infuriating. Christy and Emanuel can’t even agree on Christy’s statements about the performance of the climate models. Now I know how the public feels when one economist says, “The literature says that the minimum wage has little impact on unemployment” […]

April Fool’s at the Airport

My Facebook status is worthy of reposting here (I only repeat the best of the best): Thought of a great April Fool’s joke: Anyone who is flying tomorrow, take a little packet of microwave popcorn. Strike up a conversation with the person behind you in line as you approach the scanner, and say, “Oh shoot, […]

Aquinas Shows How God Keeps It Real

Gene Callahan linked to a very interesting post by Ed Feser. It begins in this way, and note that I’m going to abandon my normal formatting style and keep the italics the way Feser wrote it: [FESER:] For the Thomist, to say that God is the First Cause of things is, first and foremost, to […]

Leadership in the Autobots vs. the Decepticons

I can’t remember what prompted it, but for some reason my son asked if we could watch the Transformers movie. And to be clear, I am talking about the Transformers movie, the animated one with Unicron, not the abomination with Shia LeBeowulf. (It should go without saying that if you weren’t into the cartoon Transformers, […]

Privatize Outer Space!

Such is my rallying cry at Mises Canada. An excerpt: Notice too that the tradeoff doesn’t have to be between something cool and exotic on the one hand (like exploring Europa), versus something lame and boring on the other hand (like giving everybody an extra pair of dress socks). The oceans on Earth are hardly […]

Tax Treatment Bask

People are getting riled up over the IRS ruling on Bitcoin; this analysis claims that now BTC has no chance as a currency (as opposed to a mere asset that might be useful for many reasons). Here’s my question: Right now, suppose I convinced a bunch of gold bugs to start using gold coins in […]

Krugman on Tax Theory

[UPDATE below.] It’s one thing for Krugman to tell us what the Republicans or people at the Heritage Foundation are “really” after, etc., but it’s quite another when he just makes stuff up about objective economics literature. In a recent post lambasting Greg Mankiw (who won’t just admit he’s a moral monster like a man), […]

Potpourri

==> Gene Callahan tells me that this post from years ago is consistently the most heavily trafficked of his blog. I guess you know who was Daryl Hall and who was John Oates in this particular breakup. ==> My first college roommate and I built a “cardboard cathedral” (actual term we used) on the floor […]