TweetWhen President Ronald Reagan delivered this address in November 1982, I was a 24-year-old graduate student. Radically libertarian at that point for almost six years, I was sufficiently astute enough to know that Reagan wasn’t terrible on most of the issues that I cared about, but I was nevertheless insufficiently mature and astute enough to…
Ronald Reagan in 1982 on Free Trade
Ronald Reagan in 1982 on Free Trade
20 Apr 2025 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economic history, history of economic thought, industrial organisation, international economic law, international economics, liberalism, libertarianism, politics - USA, Public Choice, rentseeking Tags: free trade, tariffs
Victor Davis Hanson Should Stick to the Classics
18 Apr 2025 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, comparative institutional analysis, economic history, history of economic thought, industrial organisation, international economics, politics - USA Tags: 2024 presidential election, free trade, tarrifs
TweetHere’s a letter to The Daily Signal. Editor: Suppose I submitted to you an essay in which Thucydides is described as a first-century Roman senator who wrote a biography of Charlemagne – would you publish it? Of course not. The ignorance of such an essay would be palpable. But I would never write such a…
Victor Davis Hanson Should Stick to the Classics
Some Links
14 Apr 2025 1 Comment
in applied price theory, history of economic thought, industrial organisation, international economics, politics - USA Tags: 2024 presidential election, free trade, tarrifs
TweetBob Graboyes masterfully exposes many of the fallacies that fuel Trump’s destructive trade ‘policy.’ Three slices: In 2016, Donald Trump promised, “We’re gonna win so much that you may get tired of winning.” His advisors must have reached that point, as evidenced by the bizarre, incoherent “Liberation Day” tariff policy they helped craft. Trump supporters have…
Some Links
Some Links
13 Apr 2025 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, industrial organisation, international economics Tags: 2024 presidential election, free trade, tarrifs
TweetTunku Varadarajan’s “Weekend Interview” in the Wall Street Journal is with the great Dartmouth trade economist and economic historian Doug Irwin. Three slices: In effect, Mr. Trump also slapped tariffs on 10005, Wall Street’s ZIP Code, for America’s markets cowered in horror. Dollar assets experienced such a rout that Mr. Trump himself took notice of…
Some Links
Why Tariffs Don’t Cause and Won’t Fix Trade Deficits
12 Apr 2025 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, history of economic thought, industrial organisation, international economics, politics - USA Tags: free trade, tarrifs, unintended consequences
There’s a fundamental misconception at the root of President Trump’s tariff policies, which is the mistaken claim that the existence of a US trade deficit proves that trade is unfair. There are two related mistaken claims. One is a claim that if tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade were removed, then trade would be balanced.…
Why Tariffs Don’t Cause and Won’t Fix Trade Deficits
When Genius Failed
10 Apr 2025 1 Comment
in applied price theory, business cycles, economic growth, economics of information, economics of regulation, entrepreneurship, financial economics, global financial crisis (GFC), history of economic thought, industrial organisation, macroeconomics, politics - USA
Myron Scholes was on top of the world in 1997, having won the Nobel Prize in economics that year for his work in financial economics, work that he had applied in the real world in a wildly successful hedge fund, Long Term Capital Management. But just one year later, LTCM was saved from collapse only […]
When Genius Failed
Book review: The Economists’ Hour
10 Apr 2025 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economic history, history of economic thought, labour economics, macroeconomics
Once upon a time, economists were backroom advisers, crunching numbers and developing theories, but rarely in the limelight and certainly not the central actors in political decision-making. However, as Binyamin Appelbaum outlines in his 2019 book The Economists’ Hour, that all changed in the late 1960s. The title of the book references the period from…
Book review: The Economists’ Hour
Resource Management and Property Rights
08 Apr 2025 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economic history, economics of regulation, entrepreneurship, environmental economics, industrial organisation, law and economics, politics - New Zealand, property rights Tags: housing affordability, land supply
Brian Easton writes – While there have been decades of complaints – from all sides – about the workings of the Resource Management Act (RMA), replacing is proving difficult. The Coalition Government is making another attempt. To help answer the question, I am going to use the economic lens of the Coase Theorem, set out […]
Resource Management and Property Rights
Breaking up is hard to do
07 Apr 2025 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, entrepreneurship, industrial organisation, law and economics, politics - New Zealand, property rights, Public Choice, survivor principle Tags: competition law
Eric Crampton writes – The pendulum theory of politics suggests that policies often swing from one extreme to another without finding a balanced middle ground. Consider New Zealand’s supermarkets. Current regulations have made it near-impossible for new large-scale grocers to enter the New Zealand market.
Breaking up is hard to do
Daniel Hannan on the Logical Contradictions in the Case for Trump’s Tariffs
06 Apr 2025 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economic history, history of economic thought, industrial organisation, international economics, liberalism, politics - USA, Public Choice, rentseeking Tags: 2024 presidential election, free trade, tariffs
Tweet The post Daniel Hannan on the Logical Contradictions in the Case for Trump’s Tariffs appeared first on Cafe Hayek.
Daniel Hannan on the Logical Contradictions in the Case for Trump’s Tariffs
Good principles for RMA reform
05 Apr 2025 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economics of bureaucracy, economics of regulation, environmental economics, law and economics, politics - New Zealand, property rights, Public Choice, regulation, rentseeking, resource economics, urban economics Tags: housing affordability, land supply
Chris Bishop and Simon Court announced principles for the RMA replacement, and they generally look very good (but not perfect). Some key aspects: The new system will be based on the economic concept of “externalities”. Effects that are borne solely by the party undertaking the activity will not be controlled by the new system (for […]
Good principles for RMA reform
Trump’s tariff claims are even stupider than anyone thought
04 Apr 2025 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economic history, income redistribution, industrial organisation, international economic law, international economics, International law, politics - USA, Public Choice, rentseeking Tags: 2024 presidential election, free trade, tariffs
The White House released a list of countries and the tariff rates they charged the US. It was clearly wrong as NZ has an average tariff of around 1.7% on US imports and the list said 20%. I thought it was because they were including our GST of 15%. That would have been very dumb, […]
Trump’s tariff claims are even stupider than anyone thought
Public-Private-Partnerships?
02 Apr 2025 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economic history, economics of bureaucracy, history of economic thought, industrial organisation, law and economics, managerial economics, organisational economics, politics - New Zealand, privatisation, property rights, Public Choice, public economics
New Zealand’s economic development has always been a partnership between the public and private sectors. Brian Easton writes – Public-Private-Partnerships (PPPs) have become fashionable again, partly because of the government’s ambitions to accelerate infrastructural development. There is, of course, an ideological element too, while some of the opposition to them is also ideological. PPPs […]
Public-Private-Partnerships?
The Protectionism Edition of Economics Humor
01 Apr 2025 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, comparative institutional analysis, economic history, history of economic thought, income redistribution, industrial organisation, international economics, politics - USA, Public Choice, rentseeking, survivor principle Tags: 2024 presidential election, free trade, tarrifs
It appears that Trump wants to repeat the mistakes of the 1930s with a global trade war. That is going to be very bad news for workers, consumers, taxpayers, manufacturers, farmers, and exporters. But there are two bits of good news. At least for small slices of the populations First, lobbyists will get rich as […]
The Protectionism Edition of Economics Humor
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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