Shameless Self-Promotion

Archive for Shameless Self-Promotion

Thoughts on Obama’s Crackdown on Oil Speculators

I’m a hot little tamale over at IER’s blog today. An excerpt: Successful speculation in the commodities markets serves a useful role in reducing price volatility and providing liquidity. By jacking up the penalties on ill-defined crimes, the Administration will actually make oil prices move more erratically. The president’s finger-wagging at the big bad speculators […]

Learn Principles of Economics Online

Hey everybody, just a reminder that Wednesday my Mises Academy class starts, highlighting the most important stuff for a beginner from my Lessons for the Young Economist. Here is the infomercial about the course, and note we now have a screen shot of the syllabus.

What’s Worse (Better) Than Sunday Blog Posts?

A whole conference dedicated to bringing free-market ideas to evangelical Christians! (The link is to the main website of The Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics, which is hosting me and a dozen or so other theologians and/or economists at a conference outside of DC.) They showed us this snazzy video after the opening dinner: […]

Murphy vs. Graeber on Money, Round 2

Some 5,000 years ago, anthropologist David Graeber and I battled over his scathing critique of the standard economist (and Mengerian) account of the origin of money. He insisted that I read his book before sputtering more nonsense, and so I got The American Conservative to get me a copy. My review is now online. The […]

Landsburg v 2.0: This Time, It’s Personal

Steve Landsburg is putting out a revised edition of his classic, The Armchair Economist. Full details here. Although Murray Rothbard is the economist who most influenced me, Landsburg’s book might be the single most influential volume in terms of how I try to relay economics to the layperson. What may interest you is that I […]

On the “Big Oil Tax Loopholes”

I have a commentary at the Institute for Energy Research (IER) on the Administration’s recent efforts to stick it to the big oil companies. An excerpt: The rhetoric concerning the domestic manufacturing deduction is particularly silly. Back in 2004 Congress changed the tax code to encourage companies to keep their production activities within the United […]

Come to Porcfest 2012!

Check out this promotional poster for the Comedy Roast that will occur on Friday, June 22 at this year’s Porcfest event: Here is my write-up of Porcfest 2011. If you can get there, you should. All the details for this year’s Porcfest are here. UPDATE: Duh, here is my performance as a Roaster at last […]

Potpourri

==> I missed this when he first posted it, but Silas Barta has a good contribution on the broken window debate, and how it relates to “recalculation.” I think if Tyler Cowen had written the exact same blog post (scattered with references to classic papers in the literature) people would be doubled over at the […]