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A Suggestion to Readers Who Actually Have PhDs

C’mon, admit it–for a lot of you, reading Free Advice is your guilty pleasure, sort of like listening to Abba. I don’t have the time to do this carefully, because I actually don’t have guaranteed checks every month. (And I certainly don’t get summers off.) So here’s my suggestion. You can feel free to run […]

Breakin’ the Law, Breakin’ the Law

So as I reported here a while back, I only put the number of people in our household when filling out the Census form–and I sent it it late too. Fight the power! Now we’ve got Census guys snooping around our house. I came home when one of them was dropping off a card. He […]

CPAs versus Murphy

I seriously may become a socialist. To paraphrase George Costanza, “Bob is getting very angry!!!” Last year my CPA did my personal and business taxes, and they were rife with mistakes. Things like putting my business address on my personal tax returns, and claiming I ran my business out of my home (even though she […]

Chelsea Clinton to Marry Goldman Exec

This blog is the furthest thing from a clearinghouse of celebrity gossip, but I heard someone on the radio talking about Chelsea Clinton’s upcoming wedding to a Goldman Sachs investment banker. It just underscores how ludicrous my naive views were when I first got into free market economics. Back then, I thought “Democrats hate business […]

“I.e.” versus “e.g.”: I’m Huge

Some of us like to judge all of you by whether you correctly use “i.e.” and “e.g.” I’m not telling you to change your life just to please us, I’m just stating a fact. Here’s the distinction: I.e. ==> “in other words” E.g. ==> “for example” So this line from a student essay is funny: […]

BP, the Board Game

It’s not an Onion article, this is apparently real (HT2 Sam T.): The game was developed in the ’70s, hoping to give players “the thrills of drilling,” along with its “hazards and rewards”. Nearly 40 years later, life is imitating art. Look familiar? The only things missing are artistic renderings of dead pelicans and oil […]

Another Krugman Kontradiction?

Free Advice reader Matt Flipago tips us off to this Paul Krugman appearance on the Colbert Report. Start it around the 4:00 mark, and you will see Krugman explicitly say that the Great Depression was ended by the federal jobs bill public works program known as World War II. The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs […]

Edward Gonzales Interview

Edward Gonzales–who has written here on his economic lessons learned as a Marine in Iraq–is being interviewed tonight at 6pm PDT. Here is the link to the Internet radio show.