Utopia, you are standing in it!

Three King Charles cavaliers and two ruby cavoodle puppies stolen from the family-run dog breeder establishment Banskia Park Puppies in Gippsland, Victoria, Australia on June 23rd have been found by police in poor health and unsanitary conditions. According to The Weekly Times, the puppies were not well and had to be treated for diarrhea and dehydration before being returned to their seriously distressed mothers.

Banskia Park Puppies has been the target of animal rights groups in recent years and prior to the puppies disappearance, owner Matt Hams said he remembered seeing two two women and two children browsing near the young dogs. While the police’s case is on going and no charges havevbeen filed against the perpetrators yet, Banskia Park has excellent facilities for the care feeding of animals they breed.

None the less, Banksia Park Puppies was targeted because the animal rights group Oscar’s Law hated the…

Microfoundations are latest big thing on the econoblogosphere. Krugman, Wren-Lewis (and again), Waldmann, Smith (all two of them!) have weighed in on the subject. So let me take a shot.

The idea of reformulating macroeconomics was all the rage when I studied economics as an undergraduate and graduate student at UCLA in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The UCLA department had largely taken shape in the 1950s and early 1960s around its central figure, Armen Alchian, undoubtedly the greatest pure microeconomist of the second half of the twentieth century in the sense of understanding and applying microeconomics to bring the entire range of economic, financial, legal and social phenomena under its purview, and co-author of the greatest economics textbook ever written. There was simply no problem that he could not attack, using the simple tools one learns in intermediate microeconomics, with a piece…

There has been a tremendous rise in patent litigation in the past decade (Bessen and Meurer 2005). Many of these lawsuits have come from “non-practicing entities” – also known as patent trolls – who use their patents to sue even as they produce no products themselves. These lawsuits are often targeted at end-users rather than directly infringing manufacturers, supposedly on the grounds that end-users are less able to defend themselves (see my coauthor Erik Hovenkamp on this point). For those who feel the patent system provides too many rights to patent-holders, to the detriment of societal welfare, problems like these are case in point.

But are these worries novel? The economics of innovation and entrepreneurship is, like much of economics, one where history proves illuminating. Nearly everything that we think is new has happened before. Fights over the use of IP to collude by incumbents? See Lampe…

Patresha Isidore, 24, is facing a rather novel criminal charge after she drove nearly 20 miles with her ex-boyfriend clinging to the hood of her car.  It appears that speeding with a person on your hood down the highway will only get you a misdemeanor in Florida. The bizarre videotape is below.

Nice article by Helen Fessenden of Richmond Fed.

The idea of an “unregulated” currency, however, isn’t new. Before the Civil War, the United States ran a vast natural experiment by leaving “free banking” to the states, even while other major economies were adopting central banking. From the demise of the Second Bank of the United States in 1836 until the passage of National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864, the United States lacked a federal authority to issue and redeem banknotes, act as a fiscal agent for the federal government, or keep banknote issuance in check. Instead, banking was run by the states, and “free banks” could issue their own banknotes. But just how much did this amount to the kind of free-entry, highly decentralized currency competition that some cryptocurrency backers advocate today?

Helen says free banking experiences differed across States. It was successful in New York and New England. This was largely…

Thanks, Lefties! Makes a great campaign ad for us. Who would want to be associated with this bunch of unhinged progressives?