Category: Economics
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Wichita’s Galichia provides what government health care doesn’t
A recent editorial in The Wichita Eagle (Dr. Bill Roy: Universal care is most economic, efficient) contains several mistaken impressions. One may be disproved by recent developments in Wichita.
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The Entrepreneur As American Hero
Here’s Williams’ law: Whenever the profit incentive is missing, the probability that people’s wants can be safely ignored is the greatest. If a poll were taken asking people which services they are most satisfied with and which they are most dissatisfied with, for-profit organizations (supermarkets, computer companies and video stores) would dominate the first list…
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The Candlemaker’s Petition
You are on the right track. You reject abstract theories and little regard for abundance and low prices. You concern yourselves mainly with the fate of the producer. You wish to free him from foreign competition, that is, to reserve the domestic market for domestic industry.
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Henry Hazlitt explains Frederic Bastiat, or, a broken window really hurts no matter what the New York Times says
This simple lesson from Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson explains so much, yet so little people realize and apply the truths explained here. Even trained economists like Paul Krugman, writing in The New York Times, fail to recognize the truth of Bastiat’s lesson as explained by Hazlitt when he remarked that “the terror attack…
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Gambling study flawed. Ask casino workers.
Did you know that a study used to promote the economic development benefits of gambling in Wichita has casino workers paying for a large part of the social costs of gambling?
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The law vs. markets
One of the criticisms of raising the minimum wage is that it is Congress substituting its judgment for the market’s in determining pay. While Congress can force an employer to pay an employee a minimum amount, it can’t force the employer to keep the employee.
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Sugarcane not so sweet
Driving though the sugarcane fields of southern Louisiana during harvest, it is impossible not to dwell upon the politics behind it all. Those politics being the sugar subsidy and the benefits it brings to these farmers, and the cost of it to the rest of us.
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Unintended but foreseeable harms of the minimum wage
Understanding the minimum wage, and why an increase will be harmful to those it is meant to help, requires thinking beyond stage one.
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Problem of low wages not easily solved
It seems like an easy fix for social injustice: pass a law requiring employers to pay workers more than they would otherwise. Magically, everyone has more wealth. It would be nice if it were so easy and simple. Looking at only the immediate effects and listening to the rhetoric of some politicians and editorial writers,…
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The AirTran subsidy and its unseen effects
In a June 16, 2006 column, Wichita Eagle editorial writer Rhonda Holman again congratulates local and state government for its success in renewing the AirTran subsidy, and for getting the entire state of Kansas to help for it.
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Economics In One Lesson, 50th Anniversary Edition
This book, first published in 1946, explains common fallacies (a false or mistaken idea) that are particularly common in the field of economics and public policy.
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The Undercover Economist
This is an enjoyable book that explains the basics of how economics works, which is to say, how the world works. Mr. Harford doesn’t go into any technical detail at all, so there are no charts and graphs to decipher (although a very few are used for illustration), and there are no mathematical formulas.