Russell Roberts's Blog, page 1551

Some Links

My GMU colleague, over in the law school, J.W. Verret weighs in at the New York Times – along with Lynn Stout, Jeff Miron and some others – on the legality and wisdom of preventing BP from paying dividends to its shareholders.

Steve Hanke offers some evidence contra Keynesianism.  (HT Tom Hazlett)  Likewise does a commenter at Marginal Revolution.

Writing at Weblog Bahamas, Tibor Machan offers a lesson in freedom.

Paul Jacob trips up, with common sense, what would be a step on the road to...

More spending but no additional learning

From the Washington Post:

Under enormous pressure to reform, the nation's public schools are spending millions of dollars each year on gadgets from text-messaging devices to interactive whiteboards that technology companies promise can raise student performance.

Driving the boom is a surge in federal funding for such products, the industry's aggressive marketing and an idea axiomatic in the world of education reform: that to prepare students kids for the 21st century, schools must embrace the...

Preventing the next crisis

Arnold argues that while it's always a good idea to have better regulation, you want the cure to match the disease. My favorite point in his analysis of the financial reform that's on the table

—if the problem was that we deregulated too much over the past 20 years, then why doesn't the bill simply reset regulations to what they were 20 years ago? or 30 years ago?

Justice and the Rule of Law

Very thoughtful piece by David Rose on consequentialist thinking and the rule of law. An excerpt:

If confirmed, Ms. Kagan may hear a constitutional challenge to the mandatory insurance requirement of the new health-care law.

A nonconsequentialist judge would examine whether the Constitution empowers the federal government to require citizens to purchase a private good (health insurance) and make a ruling on that basis alone.

But a consequentialist judge would look beyond the law and consider...

Theater

It's all theater:

President Obama promised a $400 million aid package for the West Bank and Gaza on Wednesday, as the United States scrambled to come up with a way out of the stalemate in the Middle East exacerbated by the Gaza flotilla incident last week.

Mr. Obama, meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas at the White House, said that the money would go to housing and schools. White House officials said that the money also would help increase access to drinking water and to...

Unfair!

Here's a letter to the New York Times:

Criticizing yesterday's Supreme Court decision "cutting off matching funds to candidates participating in [Arizona's:] public campaign finance system," you bemoan the fact that "three candidates, including Gov. Jan Brewer, can no longer receive public funds they had counted on to run against a free-spending wealthy opponent" ("Keeping Politics Safe for the Rich," June 9).

Like candidates for public office, at my blog Café Hayek I often express political...

Ron Zappe, Entrepreneur

A genuine entrepreneur – and a man who showed that making potato chips is no less a path to success than making microchips – died last week.

Back in 2005 I wrote about Ron Zappe.  Also here.

Having read my account of his potato-chip company, Mr. Zappe sent me a very warm e-mail, as well as a huge box of his chips.  Very kind gestures.

(HT to my friend Kerry Dugas for alerting me to Mr. Zappe's death.)

Progressively Uninformed

My GMU Economics colleage Dan Klein has this excellent and revealing op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal.  In it, he reports the results of a survey that he, along with Zogby researcher Zeljka Buturovic, conducted to test American adults' grasp of basic economic ideas.  They find that people who self-indentify as "libertarian," "very conservative," or "conservative" understand basic economic principles far better than do people who self-identify as "liberal" or as "progressive."

Here's the...

Some Links

In this brief video, the Cato Institute's Dan Mitchell exposes the absurd (and growing) size and compensation packages of bureaucrats government employees.

The Independent Institute has some summer seminars for students.

Carpe Diem's Mark Perry shows that economic freedom is good for your health.

I love it when Steve Landsburg translates mainstream-media language into economically informed English.

Over at EconLog, Arnold Kling applauds Raghu Rajan's entry into the blogosphere – as do I.

John...

Protectionist Poison

Here's a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Clyde Prestowitz asserts that "A decline in U.S. imports from China would lead to an increase in U.S. domestic output and thus an increase in employment and wage gains both as a result of unemployed workers starting to work again and as a result of upward pressure on wages generated by increasing labor scarcity" (Letters, June 7).

If Mr. Prestowitz were unemployed, would he practice the protectionism that he preaches?  Specifically, would he impose...