As explained by public intellectuals such as Milton Friedman, Johan Norberg, John Stossel, and Orphe Divougny, the argument against minimum wage requirements is very simple. If politicians dictate that people can’t be employed unless they receive, say, $15 per hour, then workers who are worth less than than amount (because of low skills, no experience, […]
There are three reasons to be a knee-jerk supporter of tax cuts (or to be a knee-jerk opponent of tax increases). The morality-driven libertarian argument that people should be able to keep the income they earn. The starve-the-beast argument that less revenue at some point may translate into less spending. The economic argument that lower […]
Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman wrote the following in Slate magazine back in the 1990s:“Economic theory is not a collection of dictums laid down by pompous authority figures. Mainly, it is a menagerie of thought experiments–parables, if you like–that are intended to capture the logic of economic processes in a simplified way. In the…
While Canada eviscerates the right to free speech and association, some are apparently holding firm on the privacy rights of accused felons to warn homeowners not to post videos of thefts.
I believe I mentioned this faux pas by the BBC earlier today, but here are the hard, cold facts. On Christmas Eve, BBC radio repeated, six times, a completely false report that Israeli troops had executed 137 Palestinian civilians and buried them in unmarked graves. This of course came from a notice by the ever-reliable…
Philosopher Matt Zwolinski, co-author of Universal Basic Income: What Everyone Needs to Know, was a core member of the old Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, which shut down in 2020. Now’s he’s singledly-handed revived the BHL brand on his new Bleeding Heart Libertarian substack. Matt recently published a critique of my response to Chris Freiman on…
In my post on Monday I drew attention (again) to the fact that New Zealand has made no progress at all in reversing the decline in relative economywide productivity (relative to other advanced countries) since what was hoped to be a turning point, with the inauguration of widespread economic reforms after the 1984 election. If anything, […]
“Electrification would require sweeping changes to the nation’s power grids. Under the scenario visualized above, total electricity demand in the United States would roughly double by 2050, even as overall energy use went down.” …. “To meet that demand, electric utilities would need to add staggering amounts of new emissions-free power while making sure that all those newly electrified cars, homes and factories don’t strain the system and cause blackouts. “
Here’s an example of how indigenous peoples, on the basis of their superstitions and religion, try to control modern technology or how it’s used and science. In this case, reported by CNN (click on screenshot below), a commercial enterprise is taking some small amounts of human remains (presumably ashes, though it’s not clear) to the […]
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
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