A Blog about economics, politics, beer, and whatever else strikes our fancy.
Posted in Academics, Current Affairs, Economics, Government, Law, Policy, Politics on Oct 26th, 2009
GMU Economics Professor, Don Boudreaux, provides us with a Manneian defense of insider trading in the October 24 edition of the Wall Street Journal.
I wrote my dissertation on insider trading and corporate governance. The literature, theoretical and empirical, on insider trading is just plain huge and with time I came to slightly change my opinion [...]
Posted in Academics, Current Affairs, Economics, Education, Government, Health, Law, Policy, Politics on Jun 30th, 2009
In the light of the recent HIV case in the adult film industry, I wrote with the assistance of Chris Mitchell, Director of Communications, and Adrian Moore, Vice President of Research, at Reason Foundation, an op-ed based on my academic unpublished paper on self-regulation in the adult film industry.
The op-ed basically repeats what I wrote [...]
Posted in Current Affairs, Economics, Government, Policy, Politics, Research on Apr 17th, 2009
Sam Kazman from the Competitive Enterprise Institute has an interesting opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal today on the trade-offs between fuel efficiency and safety. In his piece, he discusses the results from a study produced by The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) showing that small cars such as the increasingly popular fuel-efficient gasoline [...]
Posted in Current Affairs, Economics, Policy, Politics on Dec 10th, 2008
Here an interesting picture that unfortunately reflects the truth about the automobile industry bailout and is another perfect illustration of rent-seeking.
HT: Lawrence H. White via Division of Labour
Posted in Current Affairs, Economics, Government, Music, Policy, Sports, Television on Nov 30th, 2008
Gregory Mankiw in the New York Times section Economic View wonders What Would Keynes Have Done? if he were still alive. Greg Mankiw restates that, according to John Maynard Keynes, “the root cause of economic downturns is insufficient aggregate demand.” Therefore, the traditional solution to this insufficient aggregate demand is to increase aggregate demand. Mankiw [...]
Posted in Current Affairs, Economics, Politics on Oct 12th, 2008
My colleague (and friend) Christopher Coyne came to our campus to give a talk on whether Liberal Democracy and Western values or, more exactly, institutions could be exported to other countries. Obviously, the talk was related to the current occupation of Iraq and the attempt of the United States to impose by force those institutions. [...]
Posted in Current Affairs, Economics, Politics on Jun 7th, 2008
Justin Logan from the Cato Institute has a nice piece that he just published in the Cato Policy Report. His piece entitled "Government, War, and Libertarianism" (you can download the PDF file of the article here , the full policy report here) and actually shows how divided libertarians have become on the issue of war [...]
Posted in Current Affairs on Apr 25th, 2008
Often, I argue with people that tax is theft and, more particularly, it amounts to coercive (violent), non-voluntary, transfer of property rights from the taxpayer to whoever is the collector of the tax: the government, the mafia, or any other organization that uses the threat of violence to collect taxes.
I always get the same answer: [...]
Posted in Current Affairs, Politics on Apr 11th, 2008
During Spring Break, I was in vacation in Los Angeles. On Saturday, while I was doing some window shopping on Melrose Avenue, I came across a very interesting poster of which I took some pictures with my digital camera. Here they are:
Following taking those pictures, I found that the very creative minds behind [...]
Posted in Current Affairs, Economics, Politics on Mar 11th, 2008
Daniel Ikenson recently posted on Cato’s Blog, Cato@Liberty, that Obama’s position on NAFTA reflects economic illiteracy, dishonesty, and naivete on the part of the Illinois Senator.
Ikenson bases his criticisms on the fact that Obama, first, criticizes NAFTA and argues that he will take a "sledgehammer" to NAFTA because it’s broken and after Obama pretty [...]