Daily Economy
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Despite Everything, Markets are Still Working in Healthcare
At the end of three frustrating days trying to find a doctor who would see me for a minor malady, a friend shot me a link to this: LiveHealthOnline. He said he gets all his prescriptions this way. Call anytime. It’s 24/7. He once called at 4am. No insurance necessary. The visit is $50 and…
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ISM Nonmanufacturing Index Rises in December But Details Are Mixed
The ISM’s nonmanufacturing NMI rose in December, but details are mixed suggesting slow growth and a cautious outlook.
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Was Bitcoin the Best-Performing Asset of the Decade?
Bitcoin’s returns over the last decade have dominated every other asset we can compare it with, but that still doesn’t tell us what we need to know about the future viability of this extraordinary development in human monetary affairs.
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How to Teach the Benefits of Trade
In an environment that constantly presents us with pessimistic reasons why things cannot be done, turning a paperclip into $225 of pizza in less than two days proves that opportunities to make everyone better off exist all around us if we just take the time to observe and act.
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Five Great and Recent Books on Economic History
The field of economic history is a hard one to dabble in. It requires the assembly of rich and complex data from the past. Unlike modern statistical series, there are no “user guides” for economists and historians who deal with past data. One must simply absorb large quantities of detail to make things as simple…
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A Swollen River of Indebtedness
The first book that Nobel-laureate economist James Buchanan wrote is titled Public Principles of Public Debt. Published in 1958, at the zenith of Keynesianism’s ascendancy among economists, this book exposed the elementary Keynesian fallacy that fueled the notion that internally held government debt is no burden for domestic citizens. Unfortunately, Buchanan’s point is easy to…
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Not Losing Sight of the Classical Liberal Ideal
We should be concerned with truth and validity, not the expediency of to what democratic public opinion seems to confine discussion of a free society at a moment in time.
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Private Governance, Not State Capacity
Economist Tyler Cowen has released a provocative essay with, I hope, the opposite of its intended impact. State Capacity Libertarianism, which he deems the only “smart” path for libertarians and classical liberals, is as conventional in its thinking as it is strangely named. At first blush his eleven-point description sounds like something that would have…
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Where are the Flying Cars?
We have good planes, good helicopters, good drones, and good cars. In the end, maybe they just need to be different things, for a while longer.
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The Hobbit Teaches that We Can’t Eat Money
There are a lot of good economic lessons to be learned from popular culture. Perhaps that’s not surprising, as the subject matter of economics is ingrained in our very humanity and movies and the arts reflect aspects of human life. By chance alone, some of that creative work ought to carry with it some profound…
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•
Despite Everything, Markets are Still Working in Healthcare
At the end of three frustrating days trying to find a doctor who would see me for a minor malady, a friend shot me a link to this: LiveHealthOnline. He said he gets all his prescriptions this way. Call anytime. It’s 24/7. He once called at 4am. No insurance necessary. The visit is $50 and…
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•
ISM Nonmanufacturing Index Rises in December But Details Are Mixed
The ISM’s nonmanufacturing NMI rose in December, but details are mixed suggesting slow growth and a cautious outlook.
-
•
Was Bitcoin the Best-Performing Asset of the Decade?
Bitcoin’s returns over the last decade have dominated every other asset we can compare it with, but that still doesn’t tell us what we need to know about the future viability of this extraordinary development in human monetary affairs.
-
•
How to Teach the Benefits of Trade
In an environment that constantly presents us with pessimistic reasons why things cannot be done, turning a paperclip into $225 of pizza in less than two days proves that opportunities to make everyone better off exist all around us if we just take the time to observe and act.
-
•
Five Great and Recent Books on Economic History
The field of economic history is a hard one to dabble in. It requires the assembly of rich and complex data from the past. Unlike modern statistical series, there are no “user guides” for economists and historians who deal with past data. One must simply absorb large quantities of detail to make things as simple…
-
•
A Swollen River of Indebtedness
The first book that Nobel-laureate economist James Buchanan wrote is titled Public Principles of Public Debt. Published in 1958, at the zenith of Keynesianism’s ascendancy among economists, this book exposed the elementary Keynesian fallacy that fueled the notion that internally held government debt is no burden for domestic citizens. Unfortunately, Buchanan’s point is easy to…
-
•
Not Losing Sight of the Classical Liberal Ideal
We should be concerned with truth and validity, not the expediency of to what democratic public opinion seems to confine discussion of a free society at a moment in time.
-
•
Private Governance, Not State Capacity
Economist Tyler Cowen has released a provocative essay with, I hope, the opposite of its intended impact. State Capacity Libertarianism, which he deems the only “smart” path for libertarians and classical liberals, is as conventional in its thinking as it is strangely named. At first blush his eleven-point description sounds like something that would have…
-
•
Where are the Flying Cars?
We have good planes, good helicopters, good drones, and good cars. In the end, maybe they just need to be different things, for a while longer.
-
•
The Hobbit Teaches that We Can’t Eat Money
There are a lot of good economic lessons to be learned from popular culture. Perhaps that’s not surprising, as the subject matter of economics is ingrained in our very humanity and movies and the arts reflect aspects of human life. By chance alone, some of that creative work ought to carry with it some profound…