Utopia, you are standing in it!

Emma Vere-Jones – according to a website in that name  – describes herself as a journalist, author and copywriter.   What distinctions she draws among those different forms of writing are a moot point, assuming she is the same Emma Vere-Jones who has brought a bunch of political pamphleteers to account as “advertisers” for disseminating material with which she disagrees.

Pamphleteering – we should not forget – was an early form of journalistm and in the days before the advent of the periodical press, pamphleteers were the world’s proto-journalists.

As a paper platform for a spectrum of religious fanatics, eccentrics, social commentators, and satirists, the pamphlet evolved as a weapon of propaganda (forged between the fledgling press and Star Chamber censorship) for powerful vested interest groups, political parties, governments – and revolutionists.

The Guttenberg revolution of the Renaissance provided the spark and the Reformation of the sixteenth century…

How many times can you say the same thing over and over and over again?

When it comes to the minimum wage, we may never know the answer.

No matter how often new research is produced showing that low-skilled workers are hurt when politicians cut off the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, politicians persist in pushing for bad policy.

Many state already have increased minimum wages, and the “Fight for $15” crowd wants a nationwide increase.

So let’s explain, for the umpteenth time, why this is misguided.

We have lots of data and anecdotes to review, so let’s begin with some scholarly research from Europe.

Here are some results from a study in Denmark, where the minimum wage increases when workers reach age 18, at which point many of them lose their jobs (h/t: Marginal Revolution).

This paper estimates the long-run impact of youth minimum wages…

Two months ago, I pointed out that San Francisco’s housing crisis was a “learnable moment” because some folks on the left actually now understand the negative consequences of government intervention.

Now I’m wondering if we might actually have a learnable moment on the issue of minimum wages for Crazy Bernie.

The Vermont socialist is experiencing something akin to what it’s like to be an entrepreneur or business owner. He’s having to generate revenue for his campaign and figure out the best way to allocate the funds.

And – surprise, surprise – he doesn’t want to pay above-market wages. Which makes him a giant hypocrite since he wants to use government coercion to impose higher minimum wages on the private sector.

Professor Art Carden highlights three things that Bernie should learn from this experience.

Bernie Sanders is having trouble with his unionized–and apparently underpaid–labor force. …the Sanders campaign…

The media went nuts when former Greens leader, Bob Brown turned on a wind farm in his backyard. Rampant hypocrisy, was just the first of the charges levelled at a man renowned for his hatred of reliable and affordable electricity.

In the result, the Liberal/National Coalition were very grateful that Dr Bob’s hatred of coal led him and his acolytes on a protest tour of Far North Queensland during the Federal election campaign in May, where Bob and a bunch of sandal wearing troglodytes railed against Adani’s proposed Carmichael mine.

Locals were ready to lynch him and his entourage (pubs refused to serve them beer) and, thanks to Bob’s job and economy wrecking stance, voters took their baseball bats to the heavily green tinged Labor party, returning the Coalition to Federal government.

The party that he founded, the Australian Greens enjoy enormous financial support from renewable energy rent seekers and…

Charles Plosser’s review paper entitled ‘Understanding real business cycles‘ is a must for all those interested in the modern theories of the business cycles. A major advantage of the paper that it is written in plain English, it has a well-organized structure and summarizes by giving a clear vision of future development. Some of the most important suggestions of the paper:

1. Keynesian macro is not a theory judged by the modern choice-theoretic standards. Keynesian models had significant empirical success but failed to trace the macro-level back to solid microfoundations.
2. The aim of general equilibrium modelling is to help us to understand the role played by optimization and equilibrating tendencies at the agent-level. It makes no sense to postulate a disequilibrium framework or market failures before understanding the contribution of a general macroeconomic equilibrium.  Large-scale fluctuations may be triggered even in the absence of market failures.
3. RBC-theory has common…