The courts have sanctioned the right to organize community opposition that urges government officials and agencies to deny land use permits to applicants, even when the underlying motive of the opposition is protecting market share and eliminating competition.
What’s more, the courts are protecting third-party funding sources, in many cases anonymous funding sources, which support the opposition efforts in order to block potential competition.
Managerial Econ: Make the rules or your rivals will: use anti-growth activists to erect entry barriers
08 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
in comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, economics of regulation, environmental economics, Public Choice, rentseeking Tags: bootleggers and baptists, rent seeking
Ideas: When Mao died, The Economist wrote
06 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
in comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, growth disasters, liberalism, Public Choice Tags: China, communism, How China Became Capitalist, mao, useful idiots
In the final reckoning, Mao must be accepted as one of history’s great achievers: for devising a peasant-centered revolutionary strategy which enabled China’s Communist Party to seize power, against Marx’s prescriptions, from bases in the countryside; for directing the transformation of China from a feudal society, wracked by war and bled by corruption, into a unified, egalitarian state where nobody starves; and for reviving national pride and confidence so that China could, in Mao’s words, ‘stand up’ among the great powers.
via Ideas and http://www.scottmanning.com/content/visualizing-the-great-leap-forward/
Six of the world’s seven billion people have mobile phones – but only 4.5 billion have a toilet, according to a U.N. report
06 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
Why does government fail?
31 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, comparative institutional analysis, Ronald Coase Tags: comparative institutional analysis, government failure, market failure, Ronald Coase
Pro-free enterprise does not mean pro-business
28 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, economics of religion, liberalism, Milton Friedman, Public Choice, rentseeking Tags: Milton Friedman
What is the precariat?
24 Aug 2014 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, development economics, entrepreneurship, growth disasters, growth miracles, income redistribution, rentseeking, technological progress, Uncategorized Tags: Leftover Left, precariat, The Great Act, The Great Enrichment, The withering away the proletariat
With the withering away of the proletariat because of the great enrichment, the Left over Left coined the word precariat.
The precariat is a social class formed by people suffering from precarity: a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare as well as being a member of a proletariat class of industrial workers who lack their own means of production and hence sell their labour to live. Specifically, it is applied to the condition of lack of job security, in other words intermittent employment or underemployment and the resultant precarious existence. The term is a portmanteau obtained by merging precarious with proletariat.
Very similar to the Karl Marx’s Lumpenproletariat: the layer of the working class that is unlikely ever to achieve class consciousness and is therefore lost to socially useful production, of no use to the revolutionary struggle, and perhaps even an impediment to the realization of a classless society.
One of the drawbacks of the precariat is they are inconveniently happier than Left over Left are willing to give them credit. For example, a lot of women in part-time jobs are happier than those in full-time jobs because of the greater worklife balance. Casual and seasonal jobs pay more too.
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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