What was the Wall Street Journal thinking of? Announcing the sad news of his passing at the age of 91 on June 6th 2012, reporter Stephen Miller misreads completely the burden of Ray Bradbury’s contributions to the literature of science fiction. (No, despite what you and I may think, Bradbury was not a macroeconomist!)...
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Now that France’s incumbent President Sarkozy has been defeated at the polls by socialist candidate M. Hollande, Americans should have gotten a wake-up call. Angela Merkel now seems to be the only voice of European reason in the rising popular tide against budgetary austerity and a return to the by now old-fashioned idea that...
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A story by Matthew Wald in the New York Times on January 9th demonstrates the poverty of governmental attempts to pick “winners” in the realm of green technologies, the wasteful subsidy programs supporting that policy goal and the huge costs for the private sector of being unable to march to Washington’s tune. Among its...
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In his most recent contribution to The Economist (January 6, 2012, p. 60), “Schumpeter” derides “hatred of bankers” as one of “the world’s oldest and most dangerous prejudices”. Arguing that “scorn for moneymen has a long pedigree”—traceable to Jesus’ expulsion of the moneychangers from Jerusalem’s Temple and to Muhammad’s proscription of usury—he rehearses the...
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An article in a recent issue of The Economist (“Sweet Land of Subsidy,” December 3rd to 9th, 2011, p. 42) tells the story of Iuka, Mississippi, a small community (2000 pop. 3,059) in Tishomingo County, where the local economic development foundation “invested” an unreported sum of the taxpayers’ money in the mid-1990s to build...
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Fresh from its near-death experience in this year’s congressional budget hearings and after yet another two interminable weeks of begging for dollars from its listeners and viewers, America’s taxpayer-financed public broadcasting system (PBS) has announced plans to launch a new television channel dedicated to programming available only to our British cousins. (See Paul Sonne,...
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Eastern bloc economists Carmen Reinhart, she of the University of Maryland, and Kenneth Rogoff, he of Harvard, have gotten rave reviews for This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, published in 2009 by Princeton University Press. I started reading it today, now that the book is out in paperback. It didn’t take...
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The following updates a column published in the Utah Statesman on September 14, 2011: Proposals to allow the collection of taxes from consumers making purchases online are like vampires or zombies. They apparently cannot be killed unless stakes are driven through their hearts or their heads are blown off. I don’t know how to...
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During the bleak days of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, the Federal Trade Commission initiated rulemaking proceedings aimed at regulating the content of television ads aired Saturday mornings, times when many children were watching cartoons. Spearheaded by then-chairman Michael Pertschuk, the FTC was worried about the impact on young, unformed minds of commercials touting sugary ready-to-eat...
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Ever since Woodrow Wilson, who embroiled American troops in the mud of Flanders and contributed to the deaths of millions of soldiers in a global “war to end all wars”, U.S. presidents have, to greater or lesser extents, pursued the goal of making the world safe for democracy. That objective is a fool’s errand....
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