Tag: Economics
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The Williams rules
The kind of rules we should have are the kind that we’d make if our worst enemy were in charge. My mother created a mini-version of such a rule. Sometimes she would ask either me or my sister to evenly divide the last piece of cake or pie to share between us. More times than…
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How To Judge the Worth of Ethanol
From The Wall Street Journal, January 27, 2007: “Ethanol gets a 51-cent a gallon domestic subsidy, and there’s another 54-cent a gallon tariff applied at the border against imported ethanol. Without those subsidies, hardly anyone would make the stuff, much less buy it — despite recent high oil prices.” Remove this subsidy and the tariff.…
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Denouncing “Greed”
Today there are adults — including educated adults — who explain multimillion-dollar corporate executives’ salaries as being due to “greed.” Think about it: I could become so greedy that I wanted a fortune twice the size of Bill Gates’ — but this greed would not increase my income by one cent. …One of the reasons…
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Preserve farmland at what cost?
There are two areas in which I believe this writer is mistaken. First, if the transaction between developer and farmer was voluntary, each is better off than they were before. The developer (and by extension the people he hopes to sell houses to) valued the land more than the farmer did. Otherwise, why would the…
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Minimum wage price controls hurt Kansas
This article presents compelling evidence that raising the minimum wage is not in the best interests of low-wage workers.
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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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Remarks to Wichita City Council Regarding the AirTran Subsidy on July 11, 2006
You may recall that I have spoken to this body in years past expressing my opposition to the AirTran subsidy. At that time we were told that the subsidy was intended to be a short-tem measure. Today, four years after the start of the subsidy, with state funding planned for the next five years, it…
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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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As expected, price controls harm Wichita travelers
The effect of the AirTran subsidy is to reduce the price of airfare to and from Wichita. That is its stated goal. If the subsidy did not work to reduce prices, we would be wasting our money. The fact is that the subsidy does work to reduce airfares to and from Wichita. It also does…
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The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
This interesting book explains in detail what many people already know: that advances in technology — and in politics to some degree — have made the world a smaller place. Not only have manufacturing jobs been moved overseas, but white-collar jobs such as accountant, computer programmer, radiologist, and many others can be done from anywhere…
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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.