Nagging Economics

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The ‘Right’ to Health Care

Declaring a right to health care, or to any scarce good, doesn’t make the good less scarce ...

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People who focus on inequality often seem to forget a historical fact: market economies have allowed a great many people to get rich and to get out of poverty. The effect is unprecedented in history. The American historian and economist Deirdre McCloskey calls it “the Great Enrichment”

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Your Brain On Drug Policy | Rachael Leigh Cook (2017)

Rachael Leigh Cook explains that the war on drugs is a war on people in a remake of her iconic spot Like and share this video if you agree and be sure to sup...

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1. When faced with the question “who should build the road?”, it is not always correct that privately-owned roads will be better than public ones. Orders between those private road owners would be crucial i.e. how to calculate tolls.

2. However, I support views on both education and anti-protectionism in previous articles.

3. Do Robots kill jobs? Several answers: http://cafehayek.com/2016/08/robots-are-nothing-new-2.html As consumption desire is not scarce, jobs will not be scarce, too. The ways robots affect us is similar to the steam engine, railroads in industrial revolution. It’s a big process of capital, and it brings us greater life.(https://fee.org/articles/fear-not-the-robots-jobs-arent-scarce/)

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The Case Against Education with Bryan Caplan

2/29/12 Education is over-rated. While it sharply increases the incomes of the well-educated, the reason is largely “signaling.” But the problem is largely t...

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Dead Wrong® with Johan Norberg - Protectionism Kills Jobs

We need protectionism to stop foreign competitors, because they destroy our industries. Shouldn’t you be willing to pay a little bit more for the goods if it...

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The Fallacies of Shrimp Protectionism

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Worth spending time reading it.

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The teachers who can best enable students to see the unseen, to appreciate what largely goes unappreciated, and to understand the logic of markets too often are derelict in their duty. Too many economics professors today teach ECON 101 as if it’s a course in curve-bending, puzzle-solving, and mathematics. This approach to teaching ECON 101 does indeed, as Dwight observes, render the typical ECON 101 course dull, dreary, dry, devoid of any obvious significance, and unnecessarily intimidating.

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International trade restrictions provide yet another example of the fallacy of composition, the belief that what is true for a part is true for the whole.

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Bonus Quotation of the Day... - Cafe Hayek

Tweet… is from page 495 of James Otteson’s superb essay “Adam Smith and the Right,” which is chapter 29 in Ryan Patrick Hanley, ed., Adam Smith: His Life, Thought, and Legacy (2016) (original emphasis): With the advent of the digital age, however, economic production has been utterly transformed; what constitutes “means of production” has now …

So the former position (socialism) tends to favor planned patterns of social order, or the correction of unplanned patterns, according to principles and authority centrally derived and administered; while the latter (liberalism) tends to favor unplanned or “spontaneous” patterns of social order that are deferential to what individuals and voluntary groups decide to do and skeptical of what third parties might like to mandate or nudge them to do.

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Generally speaking, in a market economy, the combination of incentives and human ingenuity has permitted the human population to grow with a reduction in the rate of resource use. By selling books in digital format, online retailer Amazon is letting us read more while using less paper; Airbnb is giving us more places to sleep without building hotels; and iTunes is allowing us to listen to more music without manufacturing records. We are not only leaving future generations with more know-how and more tools of production, we are also leaving them with more wilderness, more forest, and more vegetation.

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-A politically acceptable UBI would be insanely expensive. Libertarian economist and UBI advocate Ed Dolan has a detailed, fiscally viable plan to provide a UBI of $4452 per person per year. But every non-libertarian I've queried thinks it should be at least $10,000 per person per year. Even with a one-third flat tax, that implies that a family of four would have to make $120,000 a year before it paid $1 of taxes. This is pie in the sky. -If abolition of the welfare state is extremely unlikely and the UBI is worse than the status quo, does this mean libertarians should accept the welfare state as it is? Not at all. There's a straightforward moderate path to a freer world: AUSTERITY. Cut benefits. Restrict eligibility. Remind the world of the great Forgotten Man: the taxpayer. We probably can't convince the majority to end the welfare state. But "Welfare should be limited to genuinely poor people who can't help themselves" has broad appeal - and unlike the UBI, it's a clear step in the libertarian direction.

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Since humans first controlled fire and carved arrows, history is a long tale of the invention and use of labor-saving techniques and devices. Domestication of oxen and horses. Pulleys. Levers. Irrigation channels. Metal saws. The printing press. Concrete. The wheel. All save labor, yet none has led to permanent increases in unemployment. It’s true that the pace of introducing new labor-saving techniques has magnificently quickened in the past two hundred years. This fast pace continues today. Yet still we encounter no evidence that labor-saving techniques permanently increase unemployment.