Economics

Archive for Economics

More on Slavery and the Free Market

Since I got the sense that not many of you appreciated the full brilliance of my original post, I have returned to my claim that slavery could not exist in an otherwise free market. An excerpt: First, let’s switch contexts away from the emotional one of slavery. Instead, think about tools. Suppose in the middle […]

What Would It Look Like If the System Failed?

Tyler Cowen praises Daniel Drezner’s book The System Worked: The the World Stopped Another Great Depression. An excerpt Tyler gives from the book: A closer look at the global response to the financial crisis reveals a more optimistic assessment. Despite initial shocks that were more severe than the 1929 financial crisis, global economic governance responded […]

Slavery Can’t Last in an Otherwise Free Market

My latest at Mises Canada. To entice you, I’ll just quote the concluding paragraphs: The above story is just to get the logic across. I am trying to show why, IF we agree with Mises that slavery is unproductive relative to free labor, that it could not last in an otherwise free market economy. […]

Bryan Caplan vs. Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel recently gave a qualified endorsement to raising the minimum wage, arguing that in the presence of generous welfare benefits it was a second-best solution (not his terminology). The argument made no sense to me, and I was going to write it up but Bryan Caplan beat me to the punch. My question: Is […]

Heritage Confirms My Intuition on “Social Cost of Carbon” Calcs

I can’t remember mentioning this here at Free Advice so… In a recent IER post I walk through the results when a programmer at the Heritage Foundation’s ran Richard Tol’s FUND model to calculate the “social cost of carbon” (SCC) using a 7% discount rate. A 7% discount rate is one of the required parameters […]

Nick Rowe Confounds New Keynesians Yet Again

Nick Rowe has another zany post. Nick is not personally taking a stand on the minimum wage debate. However, he argues that for those economists who do think employment effects will be minimal (or even positive) from hiking the minimum wage, the theoretical argument they usually give to explain the result would also mean that […]

Follow-Up On India’s Ban on Child Labor

In a recent post I asked people to draw me a picture, illustrating the claim floating around the free-market blogosphere that India’s ban on child labor perversely led to more children being employed. (If you don’t know/remember the context, you need to go read that first post for this one to make any sense.) Well, […]

Administration Celebrates the ARRA (“Obama Stimulus Package”)–And Cites Bastiat!

I am pretty sure this qualifies as heresy. At least Paul Krugman has the decency to call French classical liberals cockroaches when discussing their relevance to fiscal multipliers. But Scott Sumner alerts us to page 33 of the Obama Administration’s 5-year report on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), aka the Obama Stimulus Package […]