Utopia, you are standing in it!

There are many reasons to oppose the various bailouts of the Greek government. Here are my two main reasons.

1. I don’t like rewarding investors who make imprudent decisions, and it really galls me to bail out the (mostly) rich people who bought Greek bonds.
2. I don’t like rewarding politicians who make imprudent decisions, and it really galls me since bailouts encourage additional imprudent behavior.

Let’s focus today on the second point.

Here’s Greece’s score for the “Size of Government” component from Economic Freedom of the World. As you can see, bailouts have actually subsidized a decline in fiscal responsibility.

And it’s worth pointing out that Greek politicians have been doing a bad job in other areas.

The burden of red tape has been, and remains, stifling.

Greece ranks at the top in difficulty in setting up and running a business among 75 countries, according…

The world is full of surprises, a fact with which rational-expectations theorists have not yet come to grips. Yesterday I was surprised to find that a post of mine from May 2016, was attracting lots of traffic. When published, that post had not attracted much attention, and I had more or less forgotten about it, but when I quickly went back to look at it, I recalled that I had thought well of it, because in the process of calling attention to Wicksteed’s anticipation of the Coase Theorem, I thought that I had done a good job of demonstrating one of my favorite talking points: that what we think of as microeconomics (supply-demand analysis aka partial-equilibrium analysis) requires a macrofoundation, namely that all markets but the one under analysis are in equilibrium. In particular, Wicksteed showed that to use cost as a determinant of price in the context of…

When Oklahoma City Council member JoBeth Hamon wassworn inearly this year, she chose to use a copy of Marxist Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” rather than the Bible.

While there’s no law or policy that requires the use of a Bible for swearing-in ceremonies, Hamon upset traditions going back to ninth-century England.

In an email to me, Hamon explained that she comes from a social services background, so she wanted to center her campaign “on uplifting voices that aren’t often at the table when our governments make decisions”— the homeless, the car-less, and so forth, from whose perspective, she claimed, Zinn told U.S. history.

“A People’s History,” she thought, “would be a good reminder of who I seek to serve.”
Implicit in the ritual of taking oaths on the Bible is the acknowledgment of the need for God’s guidance—something that U.S. presidents have signaled…

Why is Africa poor?

More than half of the world’s poorest people live in sub-Saharan Africa. Why? Why is that region so poor? There are lots of theories — some blame a “colonial history.” Others blame the weather or discrimination.

But Magatte Wade, an African entrepreneur, tells John Stossel that she knows the biggest reason from her own first-hand experience: it’s crushing government regulation. “Once you hire someone, good luck getting rid of them for any reason,” she says. Her home country, Senegal, requires government permission to fire an employee. That makes it hard to run a business. It also makes entrepreneurs reluctant to hire. Then there’s the complicated tax code. “Some people say it’s worth at least two or three truckloads of paper,” she says. Hiring an accountant to wade through that is expensive for new businesses.

Magatte started a business anyway — she makes lip balm. She has…

The request made by the Privy Council that the Queen prorogue Parliament was a clumsy and inappropriate attempt to shorten the time available for parliamentary scrutiny of the Brexit process. That much seems clear from papers submitted to the Court of Session in Cherry. It is therefore no surprise that the Inner House was receptive to the petitioners’ argument that the advice given to Her Majesty violated the conventional purposes for which prorogation ought to be used and was therefore unconstitutional (Cherry, [1]; see also Lord Sumption). Where the court erred was in concluding that the act of prorogation was itself unlawful. The intimate relationship between the prerogative power to prorogue and the supremacy of Parliament precludes such a conclusion. If, as seems correct, a response to this breach of convention is warranted, it is one that can, constitutionally, only come from Parliament itself.

In this…

If you read The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels give a poetic account of how societies evolve. Western society moved out of antiquity into feudalism and then into capitalism. In their view, capitalism is so exploitative and unstable that revolutionary forces will topple the system and impose state control over the economy. Ideally, the state itself will wither and you’ll get an idyllic communist society.

But we now know that’s wrong. The industrialized nations of the West never turned to socialism, though they did institute welfare states in the 20th century. Instead, more rural societies like China and Russia were the biggest customers of Marxism. And very few socialist states of the 20th century remained socialist in the classical senses. Socialism, and communism, was not the end of the story.

So what did we get? If you follow someone like Francis Fukuyama, you might believe that liberal capitalism is…