Russell Roberts's Blog, page 1546

Freedom Day

Here's a letter to the Washington Times:

Claire Gillen's review of Leo Damrosch's Tocqueville's Discovery of America is superb ("When the aristocrat met democracy," July 3).

With government now bossing us about as never before in personal matters – "Buy health insurance!" "'Contribute' to a government-run pension scheme!" "Eat less salt!" "Don't smoke pot!" "Click It or Ticket!" "You may not use a credit card that Uncle Sam believes charges you too much!" – Tocqueville's relevance remains...

Failure

The latest job numbers are discouraging. The economists' debate on the stimulus package will go on forever. Fans will explain that it wasn't big enough, it didn't get spent quickly enough, it wasn't focused enough, the rest of the world let us down, the situation was worse than we thought. Opponents will say that you can't help the construction sector by keeping state employees working, borrowing crowds out private more productive investment, frenetic fiddling destroys confidence and...

A Convenient Myth

Here's a letter to the Washington Post:

As if repetition makes what is false factual, Harold Meyerson again repeats the myth that American manufacturing output is declining ("In recession battle, Germany and China are winners," July 1).  In fact, if Mr. Meyerson would visit this link, he'd discover that data compiled by the Federal Reserve show that the inflation-adjusted total value of industrial output is today (May 2010) – despite the fact that we're in a recession – 67 percent higher than...

Stossel on America

John Stossel celebrates America.  Tune in on the Fox News Channel this Saturday and Sunday at 9p/12a ET.

Phew. I thought he was a racist

According to Bill Clinton (HT: Drudge) Robert Byrd wasn't a racist, he just played one on the campaign trail. He was just pretending to be a racist. To get elected. So he wasn't a racist. Just unprincipled. That's a relief. Thanks, Bill.

Obama's future

Tomorrow is the first Friday of July. The June jobs report will be released and it's not looking good. If the prognosticators are correct and there is little or no improvement in the unemployment number (and it may even go up), it would seem to seal the fate of the Democrats in November. There will only be three more job reports before the election and it seems unlikely that there will be any dramatic changes in three months. What will the Democrats run on? That the Republicans stopped them f...

Shovel-ready, revisited

According to Recovery.gov, the government has now paid out $415 billion of the stimulus funds. Tax rebates account for $163 billion. Of the $252 of direct spending, the Department of Transportation has paid out $14 billion. That's 5.5%.

Maybe it would have done more stimulating if the spending had actually been directed at projects that use shovels.

But if you're a Keynesian, spending is spending. It's all part of aggregate demand. Keynesians believe it's better to do something productive with ...

Factoryocracy

Here's a letter to the Washington Post:

A prominent group of 18th century economic thinkers – the Physiocrats – argued that the ultimate source of all wealth is agriculture.  They regarded the then-just-emerging industrial sector to be sterile.

Harold Meyerson is a member of a group that we might call the "Factoryocrats."  Just as the Physiocrats misread the once-dominant role of agriculture as proof that the only truly productive activity is farming, Mr. Meyerson's histrionic fears about the...

Some Links

Rational Optimist author Matt Ridley has this superb essay at Your Olive Branch. This essay is especially highly recommended to those persons who worry about income inequality in capitalist societies.

Gary Wolfram certainly channels Bob Higgs.

Here's the second installment in my three-part series on 'unpuzzling' the economy's complexity.  (FYI, please note that this column is for a newspaper.  It is not a venue in which the frontiers of economic understanding are pushed out.  My goal with this ...

Bastiat

209 years ago today, in southwestern France, a man who Joseph Schumpeter was later to call "the most brilliant economic journalist who ever lived" was born: Frederic Bastiat.  Sadly, this gifted writer and unmatched communicator of economics died of tuberculosis only 49 years later.

To learn more about Bastiat, you can do no better than to read Sheldon Richman's "Annotated Biography of Frederic Bastiat."