Last time I wrote about what I was reading, I said I would next read a new book entitled Anti-Capitalism by Simon Tormey. I changed my mind and have waded into the second of a projected four volume work (maybe six) by Deidre McCloskey. The first was Bourgeois Virtues and was the beginning of a detailed historical and […]
Archives
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Book Reviews and Such
07 Oct 2013
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Government Tyranny and Economic Life
27 Sep 2013
There was an interesting article here by Peter Gumbel http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2013/09/25/with-unemployment-high-france-forces-stores-to-close-early/ earlier this week on what France is doing in the face of high unemployment. Before you read, remember this is France, since the nineteenth century, one of the most socialist (small “c”) nations in Europe, allowing for brief intervals of sanity. It appears that Parisian officlals–the only […]
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Obamacare will continue to gain attention for the foreseeable future, but today’s news give two opposing and irreconcilable views. Mr Obama was asked if American’s were wrong about his health care bill (since so many oppose it). His answer? Yes, they are wrong. Yes, they are…….The problem we have is that over the last four […]
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That’s likely to be the result in the U.N.’s upcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) “fifth assessment report,” if this sneak preview reported in the WSJ is true. Indeed, the benefits of global warming could be greater than the harm: Therefore, the new report is effectively saying (based on the middle of the range […]
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The French “Get it” – Why Not the US?
12 Sep 2013
The French government finally “gets it”. Or they have been forced to get it. In response to the euro-zone debt crisis France has been increasing taxes to cut its deficit. But the French economy has hit the wall. In France Says It Will Miss Budget Deficit Targets published in The Wall Street Journal, William Horobin […]
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I came across an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday. More on Fracking and the Poor reminds us that it is private initiative and activity that is the source of economic growth in the US economy. The concluding paragraph reads in part: “It’s a classic American story of innovation, human ingenuity, risk-taking and […]
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Obamacare / Kingcare
28 Aug 2013
The economy is never stagnant, either with respect to its performance (GDP growth, inflation, unemployment rate, etc.) or with respect to the level and degree of government direction (more or less socialistic, more or less market driven, etc.). Our economy is becoming more and more socialistic. One clear marker on this road to serfdom is […]
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Crony Capitalism
23 Aug 2013
This summer I asked my colleagues at Bereans at the Gate a question – How might we define “crony capitalism”? The consensus was that “rent seeking” – the explicit and direct use of time and money for economic gain without productive wealth creation – was at the root of crony capitalism. When we think of […]
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Detroit the Exemplar
24 Jul 2013
I have been reading quite a bit on the travails of the City of Detroit and I find this is an opportunity for me to rant about one of my favorite topics: economic development efforts in cities, or what is also called urban renewal, better labeled “urban removal.” These wonderful programs (note the sarcasm please) […]
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If you think Keystone XL is a risk, can you please repeat after me: Deepwater Horizon (or even Exxon Valdez)? Bret Stephens has a piece on this today in the WSJ, par excellence. Extreme environmentalists, for whom environmentalism is their religion, do not understand the inevitability of tradeoffs in the fallen world we live in. […]
Bert Wheeler
Jeff Haymond
Marc Clauson
Mark Caleb Smith
Tom Mach