Privatize the Borders!
I argue that Bryan Caplan isn’t radical *enough* when it comes to immigration. An excerpt:
First let me deal with the question of the libertarian ideal. If politics weren’t an issue, and we could get the society we really want, I think both Bryan and I would want all real estate held in private hands. There would be no such thing as “immigration policy” or “border control,” except for what each landowner decided for his or her property boundary. If the current border between the U.S. and Mexico ended up being divided among 2,870 different people, owning contiguous plots of land that collectively reached from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean, then those individuals would have the legal right to decide whether to build a fence to keep out Mexicans or whether to have a giant neon sign saying, “Hola Amigos!”
Canadian Budget Cuts Didn’t Rely on “Offsetting Monetary Expansion”
I manage to take on both Keynesians and Market Monetarists in this blog post, while sparing David R. Henderson. It’s like in the arcade when you shoot the bad guys without hitting the civilians. (David R. Henderson might even call himself a Market Monetarist; I’m not sure. Don’t ruin my joke.) The conclusion:
The experience of Canada in the mid- to late-1990s shows that it is entirely possible for a government to engage in relatively large spending cuts without plunging the economy into recession. The fact that Canada’s “fiscal austerity” went hand-in-hand with plunging interest rates and soaring net exports isn’t a lucky coincidence to be attributed to wise central bankers, but instead is the natural outcome from reversing the government’s siphoning out of billions from the loan market. The Canadian government simply reversed the familiar stories of “crowding out” and “twin deficits” with beneficial results for its citizens. Other governments should learn from the episode.
Using IPCC’s Own Numbers to Defeat UN Climate Policy Agenda
In honor of the summit in NYC, I used the latest IPCC report to show that a popular policy goal fails a global cost/benefit test. Now you know why they are moving the goalposts.
Emanuel Derman FTW
Tyler Cowen linked to this symposium in the Guardian on Piketty’s success. Emanuel Derman’s response is awesome; here’s the latter half:
[Economists] can’t agree on the efficacy of money printing or austerity. They keep changing their minds every few years about conventional wisdom while at every instant appearing to be certain that they are right. My gripe with economists is not that their models don’t work well – they don’t, look at the role of central banks in the financial crisis – but that they seem so reluctant to acknowledge the riskiness of their advice. And yet, beware their fearsome unelected power. Anyone visiting from Mars last year and asking to be taken to our leader would undoubtedly expect to meet Bernanke.
As a result their public arguments have an incestuous yet masturbatory quality that is exhausting to follow. The only field more self-confidently but just as regularly wrong as economics is nutrition, whose recommendations to shun butter/margarine or red meat/carbohydrates regularly reverse themselves.
Natural scientists (physicists, chemists, biologists) have had frightful power, and not always used it well. But at least they can more or less agree about truth and efficacy. Economists cannot, except by using statistical regressions which are often flawed and prove little.
So I cannot currently bring myself to read over 600 pages by an economist. One day I do hope to read Piketty’s book.
Fear & Loathing in Secondary School
I have to keep this vague so as not to even remotely implicate specific people, but over the weekend I went to my 20th high school reunion. I talked to some people who flabbergasted me with the complimentary things they said; I would have previously guessed that they kinda sorta knew who I was, but that was about it. Also, I talked to other people who were very defensive regarding people from other social circles, attributing motives to them that I knew just weren’t true.
When I stepped back and thought about it, what had happened is that one or two people from a given group had indeed been “jerks” (their critics would have used much stronger terms at the time, calibrated to the gender of the offender in question), and since these people were friends with a bunch of others, the recipient of the injustice/insult assumed the entire group endorsed it and thought the same thing. But no, that’s not really what happened.
I’m mostly bringing this up because I’m curious if any of you would report a similar epiphany. For example, if you vaguely remember, “Oh yeah, those guys were a bunch of a-holes,” is it because every single member of their group did something objectionable? Or if you think about it person by person, is it rather that you had a problem with one or two guys out of 20? And–if your walk down memory lane is like mine–is it that the 18 or 19 out of 20 were actually fine?
In full disclosure, I went to a private (Catholic) school so I realize my high school years were sheltered compared to those of many others. But I’m curious if any of you can change your memory of your teenage years just by thinking through your experiences with a blank slate and holding individuals accountable only for their own actions, not the actions of everybody who sat with them at lunch too.
Potpourri
==> David R. Henderson gives a comprehensive response (with the help of Scott Horton) to Richard Epstein’s case for a libertarian intervention against ISIS.
==> Speaking of Syria, check out my old post on “More Middle East Map Fun!”
==> Robin Hanson has an interesting post that suggests economists don’t actually care about changing the world. (HT2 Art Carden)
==> Ed Feser complains that no deep theist has ever advanced the argument that “everything must have a cause,” and yet atheists keep knocking it down with triumph.
==> Speaking of deep thinkers, Neil deGrasse Tyson is remarkably flippant about his made-up quotes, and so are his fans.
==> Can this be possible? A teenager gets 23 years in prison for shooting a dog (when he was 16) after breaking into a house?
==> It looks like Krugman is going to debate someone after all.
“Hang on Sloopy” in the Hometown
I’m back in Rochester for my 20th high school reunion (this weekend). While here I decided to treat this group of strangers to a classic tune from the McCoys. The crowd really gets into it at the end.
Climate Change Activists Move Goalposts Yet Again
My latest IER post. An excerpt:
In the present post, I’ll walk through yet another example of this phenomenon, in this case a recent ThinkProgress article that complains that GDP (Gross Domestic Product) isn’t a good metric when it comes to the debate over climate change. As we’ll see, when confronted with very compelling arguments that the IPCC reports and leading computer models do not justify the aggressive government intervention that the people at ThinkProgress seek,[1] they don’t dispute the point. Instead, they rattle off all sorts of reasons that the IPCC is essentially wrong, because the computer models used in the IPCC reports leave out important details, and because the standard cost/benefit approach to judging policy recommendations doesn’t work when it comes to climate change.
All of this should make innocent onlookers very suspicious. For years, advocates of heavy restrictions on energy use and individual liberty have cited the IPCC reports in their proclamations that “the science is settled” and that only “deniers” could possibly dispute the need for immediate and strong government actions. Now all of a sudden, the leading advocates are changing their case mid-stream, implicitly admitting that the weight they originally put forth on the IPCC reports will no longer give them the conclusion they want.
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