Russell Roberts's Blog, page 1567

Interview with George Selgin

Here's a great interview with George Selgin.

Infectious Statism

Here's a letter sent to the New York Times:

Ellen Bravo believes that children who get sick with infectious diseases such as the flu are rushed too quickly back to school because their parents must return to work (Letters, April 18).  Her solution: "we must pass public policy guaranteeing paid sick days."

Ms. Bravo rushes too quickly to a rude and crude 'solution.'  The numbers of paid sick days, along with other working conditions and wages, are the results of the voluntary choices of...

Some Links

The Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby has a great column on Spirit Airline's fees for carry-on luggage – and on Transportation Sec'y Ray LaHood who is yelping that his agency will try to prohibit such fees:

According to the Transportation Department website, LaHood's entire career has been spent on government payrolls; he has no business experience of any kind. Perhaps that explains his fatuous notion that Spirit, a for-profit company in a fiercely competitive industry, can jack up its fees without...

Culture of Dependence and Culture of Independence

George Will writes wisely on the pathologies and the politics of a value-added tax.

A VAT will be rationalized as necessary to restore fiscal equilibrium. But without ending the income tax, a VAT would be just a gargantuan instrument for further subjugating Americans to government.

Believing that a crisis is a useful thing to create, the Obama administration — which understands that, for [faux:] liberalism, worse is better — has deliberately aggravated the fiscal shambles that the Great...

Demsetz on Economic Man

One of my all-time favorite economists is U.C.L.A.'s Harold Demsetz.  I'm finally getting around to reading his 2008 collection of essays, From Economic Man to Economic System.

The first essay in this book is entitled "Where Economic Man Dwells."  It's vintage Demsetz.  Here's a slice from pages 8-9, in which Demsetz discusses "the caricature of economic man created by the model's critics":

Consider again the persons depicted in Puccini's opera [La Boheme:].  The landlord is cast as a dolt and...

Watching "P"s and "Q"s

Here's a letter sent earlier this week to the New York Times:

Paul Krugman rightly writes that housing prices "rose sharply only where zoning restrictions and other factors limited the construction of new houses.  In the rest of the country – what I [Krugman:] once dubbed Flatland – permissive zoning and abundant land make it easy to increase the housing supply, a situation that prevented big price increases" ("Georgia on My Mind," April 12).  But his conclusion that this situation, where it...

Not a Taxing Concept

Here, in full, is Steve Landsburg getting to the bottom of taxing and spending:

What a relief. Now that April 15 is out of the way, my tax rate is back to zero for another year.

At least that's the way the President of the United States seems to have it figured—your tax burden, according to him, is measured by what you're paying right this moment as opposed to what you're obligated to pay in the future.

That's the only possible interpretation of his statement last night that Tea Partiers (and...

Party On!

Here's a letter to the New York Times:

Lloyd Binen alleges that the Tea Party movement is "racially tinged" and "hypocritical" (Letters, April 16).

Yesterday I attended for the first time in my life a political rally – the Tea Party rally on the D.C. mall.  By far, the most common banner waved by members of the crowd was the flag that warns "Don't Tread on Me."  And this sentiment was reflected in the speeches delivered by the likes of Michele Bachmann, Andrew Breitbart, and Ron Paul – the...

He forgot about the $1.6 trillion deficit

An unsolicited email from the Democratic Policy Committee points me to this short unintentionally entertaining video. Senator Casey (D-PA) talks about tax cuts while ignoring massive future tax increases necessary to pay for the deficit. Includes some nice class warfare and a theory about the relationship between tax cuts and landing the economy in the ditch.

Budget Cutting

Budget cutting.  (HT Kerry Dugas)