mrclay.rg

Bad Analogies Lead to Bad Policies

I was forwarded an e-mail that made a terrible analogy (my emphasis): Here’s another way to look at the Debt Ceiling: … You come home from work and find …  your home has sewage all the way up to your ceilings. Sewage would make a home immediately uninhabitable and actively damage the value of the

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Honduras Might Try Charter Cities

From the Charter Cities blog: The government in Honduras is convinced that a charter city could be the safe playing field, with new rules, where Hondurans of all backgrounds can come together and put their skills to work with the financial resources, expertise, and technology available in the rest of the world. I first read

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Kristof on Haiti & Trade

I can’t agree more. Ultimately what Haiti most needs isn’t so much aid, but trade. Aid accounts for half of Haiti’s economy, and remittances for another quarter — and that’s a path to nowhere. The United States has approved trade preferences that have already created 6,000 jobs in the garment sector in Haiti, and several

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“Buy American”

When economies are struggling, protectionism seems well-intentioned: By “buying American” we can go back that golden fantasy age when everything was American-made and everyone had a decent-paying job and could afford the latest luxuries. I have some examples that I hope can convince you that freer trade benefits everyone. It’s not completely intuitive; we commonly

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The Hard Road Ahead

I’m starting to believe the only way out of this recession and national deficit is through tough choices that offend the ideologies of every political party: higher taxes for everyone spending cuts, including the military bailouts for state/local safety nets that ease real human suffering, not select industries finding and migrating to foreign aid measures

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Why the Pernice Brothers Don’t Tour

From “Will he/they tour?“: JP: We make any money if we tour for two weeks? JL: You mean ten days, if rehearsals are included. JP: Yes. JL: No. JP: Well then why would we do it? RM: Because Menck wants to rock. JL: Theoretically, the tour is just one piece of the things you do

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Reasons to Extend Unemployment Benefits

From the left, Ezra Klein: the Bush tax cuts certainly majorly increased the deficit [CBO], and it’s unfair for the GOP to demand that the unemployment extension be deficit-neutral. Further, if tax cuts don’t need to be paid for because they generate so much taxable economic activity that they pay for themselves, then neither do

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Charter Cities seem better than foreign aid

The Atlantic has a great piece on Paul Romer and his push for “charter cities”. I agree completely with Romer that fair laws with economic liberties is the only way to support economic growth. While probably true in the old world, very few countries remain impoverished simply because of geography. Tyrants plague the people of

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California’s upcoming Cannabis ballot initiative

In November Californians will see on their ballot the Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010. The act would basically “legalize” cannabis—all involved in such an industry would remain in violation of the federal Controlled Substances Act, and subject to the whims of the federal DEA and Dept. of Justice—for adults 21 and up,

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HealthCare Thought Exercises

I can’t remember where, but I’m fairly certain I saw compelling evidence that nations with universal access to healthcare, contraceptives, and abortions have the lowest rates of abortions. Let’s assume this is true. Also assume that the U.S. military, as well as foreign militaries aided by the U.S., engage in a perhaps small but non-zero

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Magnetar on This American Life

Today I heard the tail end of a fantastic This American Life episode based on a ProRepublica story on the hedge fund Magnetar. The short version is that, when the housing market started to appear unstable in 2005, Magnetar realized that bad incentives at investment banks would allow it to make money by creating a

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On the FairTax

I’ve not read the original FairTax book, and have only flipped through the follow-up written to answer the critics, but I have spent many hours reading about it online over the years, and back when I listened to Boortz of course he pushed it. At the moment, I don’t see it as workable and I

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Is Detroit the Outcome of Liberalism?

Lately Detroit’s terrible situation is given as proof that liberalism inevitably leads to cities lying in ruin with high unemployment, high crime, poor education outcomes, etc.

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Questions for Economists

(First of the series “Getting rid of all these draft posts”) Should we really go back to the Gold Standard? I gather only Austrian school (Mises, Hayek, et al.) economists really think a return to “sound” money would be possible or beneficial to the economy, and most prominent economists think it would be disastrous. Has

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