Russell Roberts's Blog, page 1552

Last call

The latest EconTalk is an inteview with Daniel Okrent on his book, Last Call. Superb book. You be the judge of the podcast but I enjoyed talking with him very much. My only disappointment was forgetting to ask him about Irving Fisher, who was a big fan of the big ban partly because he claimed it would make workers more productive. (I hate the idea of things being "good for the economy" rather than good for human beings.) But we did get to many interesting aspects of the ultimate alliance of t...

We are inept

From a column by David Warren on human incompetence (HT: David Stinson):

Let me mention in passing that President Barack Obama was in no way responsible for the catastrophe, and that there is nothing he can do about it. He is being held to blame for "inaction," as wrongly as his predecessor was held to blame over Hurricane Katrina, by media and public unable to cope with the proposition that, "Stuff happens."

In a sense, Obama is hoist on his own petard. The man who blames Bush for everything...

Unjust Comparison

Here's a letter to the Washington Post:

Jim Hoagland ends his otherwise fine column on South Africa by comparing American Tea Partiers to apartheid-applauding Afrikaners ("Ex-president de Klerk teaches the inspiration of South Africa," June 6).

This comparison unjustly smears the great majority of Tea Partiers.  Is Tea Partiers' judgment that Uncle Sam's scale and scope have become too large really hateful?  Is their opposition to nationalized health-care and to bailouts of Wall Street and of...

Hint: One of these Dates is Really a Date of Baptism

Trivia question, signifying nothing: Which two famous economists have as their officially recorded birthdays June 5th?

Green Thinking

Here's a letter sent yesterday to a DC-area all-news radio station, WTOP:

I missed the name of the expert interviewed today, during the 11am hour, who said that farmers' markets are better for the environment than are supermarkets because foods sold at farmers' markets "are shipped shorter distances" than are foods sold at supermarkets.

This expert jumps too quickly to what is probably a mistaken conclusion.

Although foods sold at farmers' markets are indeed grown close to the places where they...

The Necessary Ignorance of Our Leaders

Here's a letter sent yesterday to the Washington Post:

George Will explains the differences between (James) "Madisonians" and (Woodrow) "Wilsonians ("The danger of a government with unlimited power," June 3).  In so doing he eloquently exposes Wilsonians' naive trust in powerful government and their haughty disdain for individual economic freedom.

Mr. Will's timely criticism of Wilsonian 'Progressives' calls to mind an observation by the great English jurist F.W. Maitland.  After listing...

The Theory of Free Banking

George Selgin's 1988 book, The Theory of Free Banking: Money Supply under Competitive Note Issue, is now available on-line, free, at the Online Library of Liberty.

This development deserves loud applause, for this book is a major work contributing to our understanding not only of free banking, but of banking and money more generally.

(George completed the first draft of this book – which was his dissertation at NYU – when he and I shared an apartment during our first years as young assistant...

North and South

I recently read, for the first time, Elizabeth Gaskell's novel North and South.  It was originally published in in 1855.  "North" refers to Manchester, England (which, in the novel, is named "Milton").  "South" refers to bucolic, rural England.

Although a friend of Charles Dickens, Gaskell – at least in this novel (which is the only work of hers that I've read) – is rather anti-Dickens.  (Qualification: Having now read several Dickens novels, including Hard Times, my opinion is that, while...

Some More Links

At Cato@Liberty, Johns Hopkins University economist Steve Hanke confidently challenges Paul Krugman's Keynesianism.

About a month ago, Steve Horwitz challenged some Tea Partiers to reconsider their opposition to immigration.

John Stossel's show tonight is inspired by Hayek's The Road to Serfdom – from which book's page 126, by the way, comes this mystery quotation.

Some Links

Bob Higgs – in the current issue of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy – sees government power ratching upward.  And not to the good.  (By the way, this entire Spring 2010 issue of the HJLPP is outstanding.  Other contributors to it are Richard Epstein, Arnold Kling, Jon Macey, Jeff Miron, and Steve Moore & Tyler Grimm.)

The American Enterprise Institute's Roger Bate comments on Pres. Obama's Nobel Prize-winning skills at politically correct verbal vacuousness.

James Pethokoukis finds...