Bob Murphy Show Ep 9: Norman Horn on Romans 13 etc.
Norman gives the best handling of this tricky subject I’ve yet heard. Plus we discuss all sorts of other stuff.
Lara-Murphy Show Ep. 65
This was a deep(er) dive into IBC mechanics, in response to a friendly wager submitted by two listeners. Specifically:
The controversy concerns two apparently conflicting goals: On the one hand, Nelson Nash says in BYOB that you should pay more against your policy loans than the insurance company requires, effectively buying more paid-up life insurance. But on the other hand, shouldn’t you aggressively fund your IBC policy up to the MEC limit right away, meaning there wouldn’t be any room left to pay more on a loan?
The Dyson Sphere: I’m Not Saying It’s Aliens, But…
On Twitter I came across the actual paper (it’s one page) in which Freeman Dyson spelled out his idea of a sphere that harnesses the total energy output of a star. I never knew the context, though: He suggested that aliens had already built them, and explained the signature we should look for.
Potpourri
==> For some reason, I was thinking about debt forgiveness and how the IRS treats that as taxable income. (In a related point, when Oprah first started giving cars out as prizes, apparently the recipients were upset because they’d get hit with a huge tax bill. So then Oprah had to cover the tax liability too, for her gift of a car to people.)
This came up I’m pretty sure in the wake of the housing bust, where even if a bank forgave somebody’s mortgage debt, the IRS would treat that as taxable income. Libertarians and normal people alike were outraged.
However, notwithstanding that taxation is theft, given the structure, it actually makes sense. Forgiving a debt in terms of the accounting is equivalent to income. (The recipient’s ability to consume without reducing capital goes up the same amount, whether you forgive $10,000 in debt or give the individual $10,000 in cash–at least if you assume the individual could borrow $10k from somebody else, which I agree might be dubious and partly what’s driving the outrage in the Oprah/mortgage examples.)
Anyway, it occurred to me that if the IRS didn’t treat debt forgiveness as income, then a company could hire someone, lend him $100,000 at the beginning of the year, and then just be “nice” and forgive the loan in equal installments each month. The company could still deduct the $100k as a business expense, but the individual wouldn’t have to report it as income, since a loan is not income.
==> I was reading SlateStarCodex and he linked to this previous post from 2014, which I had read at the time, but it was excellent.
Surrendering to God
My girlfriend owns a massage studio and she told me that with some clients, they refuse to relax and stay tense, making it impossible for her to help them as much as she could, if they would only let down their defenses and trust her.
It occurred to me that this is what we do with God. Jesus said, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.”
Potpourri
==> On episode 8 of the Bob Murphy Show I interview David R. Henderson. Among other topics, we discuss his time on the Council of Economic Advisors where he rubbed shoulders with Krugman.
==> On episode 167 of Contra Krugman we call an audible and cover “hard topics” in libertarianism, such as terrorism and medical quarantines.
==> In the recently released Lara-Murphy Report, we interview Steve Landsburg. Note that we ask Steve to discuss some topics that didn’t come up in my podcast interview with him.
I Feel Like I’m Taking Crazy Pills
Do any of you notice that my blog looks different? Specifically, does it seem that a lot of the borders have disappeared? (Maybe I’ve been hacked by Bryan Caplan?) My web guy recently did an upgrade, and so I thought that was it. But when I go to the Wayback Machine to try to show him what (I thought) it looked like before, it is also Open Borders Blog. Any thoughts?
Murphy Twin Spin on Economics of Climate Change
I have two new interviews out, both on the economics of climate change.
==> The first is with Jeff Deist (president of the Mises Institute).
==> The second is with Josiah Neeley and Doug McCullough, at least one of whom supports carbon taxes.
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