Just after President Washington’s birthday celebration, the Wall Street Journal reported that the protests beginning in Wisconsin had spread to a dozen other states including Montana. I find this a fitting tribute to the wisdom of America’s founders—and to Wisconsin, often a harbinger of political reform. First, consider the Founding Fathers. They well understood the […]
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There is one group of workers who have signed a consent decree with the federal government, agreeing to never form a union. Do you know who they are? Answer below the fold. The economics of unions is quite simple. Like medieval guilds, the goal of a modern union is to monopolize the supply of labor […]
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From USA Today (January 16, 2011) Most people intuitively know that the worst thing government can do in the middle of the deepest recession in 70 years is enact policies that increase the expected cost of labor. Yet that is exactly what happened last spring, with the passage of the health care reform bill, says […]
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From The Wall Street Journal (January 4, 2011) The least surprising event of 2010 was that, in the wake of new federal limits on how credit-card issuers can price risk and adjust interest rates, more Americans had to go to payday lenders, pawn shops and local loan sharks in order to get credit. It’s simply […]
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Janus is the Roman god of beginnings and endings, comings and goings, and time. As we enter January 2011, we sense that time is speeding up. Perhaps this feeling is a sign of age, but likely it is related to the increased connectivity of our lives. The word “surge” has, well, surged to popularity in […]
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Last month the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment conducted a program for seminary professors and religious leaders on “Our Environment: Economics, Ecology, and Ethics.” The conference was designed to further FREE’s mission, which is to “assist judges, religious leaders and other community leaders and scholars by conducting seminars that provide tools and […]
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Every loan bears some risk that it will not be repaid. In making a loan, a prudent lender will accurately price the risk of the loan. Regulations that interfere with the ability to price risk accurately leads lenders to reduce their risk exposure by curtailing lending. Since President Obama’s comprehensive financial overhaul bill would fundamentally […]
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We’ve all heard the phrase, “Bad money drives good money out of circulation.” This is now called Gresham’s Law but it dates back to the ancient Greeks. What does this mean in practice and how might it be relevant to the internet and more generally to civility in our public discourse? First I’ll consider legal […]
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Each year we host a few dozen horses on our winter range. They are given hay when snow makes grazing difficult but they normally feed on rangeland and uncut hay fields. The horses have running spring water just south of our house and most mornings they troop down to drink. This is always a beautiful […]
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I happened to be reading Arnold Kling and Nick Schultz’s excellent new book, From Poverty to Prosperity, when the earthquake struck Haiti. This quake was a 7.0 magnitude event, the same as the Bay Area quake of 1989. The geological disturbances may have been equal but the result surely was not. The California quake killed […]
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