Russell Roberts's Blog, page 1559

Open Letter to the President of a Teachers' Union

Ms. Clara B. Floyd, President

Maryland State Teachers' Association

Dear Ms. Floyd:

One of your organization's spokeswomen (speaking today on WTOP radio) explained that performance-based pay for teachers is "unfair" to teachers.  The proffered reason is that so much of a child's intellectual development is affected by home environment, neighborhood influences, and other factors outside of teachers' control that it is impossible to determine each teacher's success or failure simply by measuring c...

Cleaned by Capitalism XX

Every Christmas, Wallace Trevillian – founder and first Dean of Clemson University' business school – sends as gifts to his many friends around the country big tins of delicious roasted Virginia peanuts.  Just today I polished off the peanuts received this past Christmas.  The peanuts I ate today were as fresh and as yummy as were the peanuts that I ate from that tin back in December.

One source of this sustained freshness is, of course, the tin itself: it helps to protect the peanuts from...

Some Links

Cato's Dan Mitchell explains, in this short video, six reasons why the optimal capital-gains tax rate is zero.

Susan Dudley and Melissa Warren – in this letter in yesterday's Wall Street Journal – expose the perverse incentives faced by government bureaucrats.

John Stossel offers a quick and useful tutorial on the economics of price ceilings.

Niall Ferguson reviews the most recent book written by Richard Posner – whom Ferguson describes as a "small-government Keynesian."

The Division of Labour's...

The Solution is to Think In Terms of Tradeoffs

Here's a letter to the Washington Times:

Ridiculing Charlie Crist's 'plan' to keep Social Security solvent simply by eliminating "waste and fraud," Samuel Burkeen properly complains that politicians too often insult us with such idiotic and empty promises (Letters, May 8).  But the appropriate response to the likes of Mr. Crist is not to demand that he and other politicians offer substantive "solutions."  As Thomas Sowell points out, in economic matters there are seldom "solutions"...

Free Goodies from Strangers Have Hidden Dangers

In the Christian Science Monitor, I write an open letter to Greece's protestors.

An Open Letter to Ezra Klein

Dear Mr. Klein:

You allege that when unemployment is high, a slowing of productivity growth is "good news" for the economy ("When bad economic news is good news," May 6).  The reason, according to you, is that the greater the number of workers required to produce a given amount of output – everything from a Starbucks' latte to a Boeing 747 – the higher is the is the demand for workers.

The relationship between productivity and demand for workers isn't this simple.  (If your employer, the...

Eatin' that Rainbow Stew

Here's a letter to the Washington Post:

Ever the romantic about popularly elected government, E.J. Dionne writes that "The central tasks of democratic government, after all, typically involve standing up for the many against the few, the less powerful against the more powerful" ("Can we reverse the tide on government distrust?" May 6).

That's the theory.  Here's the reality: The central activities of democratic government, after all, typically involve standing up for the few against the many...

Who's Next?

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Open Letter to Prof. Barry Popkin

5 May 2010

Prof. Barry Popkin

Department of Nutrition

University of North Carolina

Chapel Hill, NC  27516-2524

Dear Prof. Popkin:

A segment on WJLA-TV's 11:00pm newscast yesterday featured you endorsing a tax on pizza.  You justified such a tax on grounds that Americans today eat too much "junk food."

Believing Americans to be too dimwitted or lacking in self-control to choose for themselves what to eat, you obviously also believe that college professors possess the moral authority to propose...

Sitting at the table together

One of the themes of my take on the crisis is that the major financial players were lending money to each other and worried less than they should have about getting paid back because the government almost always bails out creditors of large failing financial institutions. When everyone is lending to everyone else in a with little or at least less worry than usual, you can really magnify the profits and the damage when it falls apart. And when it falls apart, because everyone has financed...