Patrick McLaughlin: Capturing the Administrative State, Word by Word

Congress can tell you, to the dollar, what a new program will cost over ten years. It’s much harder to answer a simpler question: how much regulation are we adding—or subtracting—when we change the rules of the game?

We treat fiscal policy like a ledger. We treat regulation like a weather report: lots of feelings, few numbers.

David Neumark: The Minimum Wage Is a Dead End

Policymakers and voters care about reducing inequality and poverty, although they have historically disagreed about how to do this. In recent years, though, higher minimum wages having emerged as one of the most—if not the most—politically popular approaches to supporting low-wage workers and low-income families.

Anton Chamberlin: When Production Isn’t Production and Prices Aren’t Prices

Many debates on economic topics hinge on a set of familiar words: production, prices, costs, value. These terms appear constantly in political speeches, news articles, and policy discussions. Yet they are rarely used with much precision (at least where academic economists are concerned). As a result, people often talk past one another while believing they are in agreement — or disagreement — about the same thing.

Point of Order: How good (or bad) is China’s economy?

If you enjoy extreme scenarios, you won’t want to miss the rant essay Why Chaos Favors the Strong in the Coming Great Decoupling on the Campbell Ramble blog — a spirited case for a strong power slowly strangling a weaker opponent that merely looks strong.

Professor Robert MacCulloch: Would Elon Musk get a fail in Monetary Economics by Milton Friedman?

As much as I admire much of what Elon Musk stands for, amusingly he's now getting into economics in a big way. Seems its a hobby for him, when he's not launching rockets. Its related to his new role as boss of the Department of Government Efficiency (or "Doge"). On that note, with President Trump sitting next to him, he gives us a mini-lecture on monetary economics. It starts off, "Provided the economy grows faster than the money supply .. and the output of real useful goods and services exceeds the increase in the money supply .. then you have no inflation". Is this correct?

Jefferey Jaxen: The Real Purpose of Net Zero

The recent Telegraph headline rang out of England recently with unsettling tones: Tenth of farmland to be axed for net zero

More than 10 per cent of farmland in England is set to be diverted towards helping to achieve net zero and protecting wildlife by 2050, the Environment Secretary will reveal on Friday.

Peter St Onge: Every Bureaucrat Destroys 138 Jobs

An Auburn University study says every single regulator destroys fully 138 private sector jobs every year you keep him on the job.

With nearly 300,000 federal regulators, the shock is that we still have any jobs at all.

Professor Robert MacCulloch: National Defunds Economics.....

National Defunds Economics, saying NZ needs instead to invest in "Core Science" that has "Economic Impact".

Minister Judith Collins, who came to speak to my law and economics class last year, and said she "loved meeting the lecturer" - how sweet - this week announced she's defunding economics research. Maybe the class didn't go as well as I thought. The Beehive says, "The focus of the Marsden [Research] Fund will shift to core science, with humanities & social sciences panels .. no longer supported".

Peter St. Onge: They Have the Money - We Have the Numbers

Authoritarianism is back across the West — from Europe to the Biden-Harris censorship regime that would fit perfectly in Communist China.

I think many of us were surprised during Covid to realize just what the supposedly liberal West has become: Essentially the Soviet Union but with better uniforms — well, better video games, anyway.

Of course, it was decades in the making — Covid just showed their cards.

The question, as always, is What’s Next.

David Barnhizer: Migration, Assimilation, and the Limits of Compassion

As I write this I am sitting on a balcony thirty feet above the Plaza Mayor in the center of Madrid Spain. Madrid is a fantastic city and, in my opinion, one of the last cities in the world where the idea and reality of what a healthy city should be still exists. This is my sixth visit to Spain where my wife lived during her Junior year of college, and brought me shortly after we were married. This trip is even more fascinating than the others. The reason for the difference is due to the dismaying contradictions posed by an exciting, safe, and strongly interactive urban giant such as Madrid and the declining, almost Third World, cities that now characterize much of America.

Eric Hussey: The Carbon Alarmists Are Silent about This

I value thought experiments as useful tools to understand how things work. Thought experiments, also known as idealized experiments, have a surprisingly noble history. For example, Albert Einstein used the thought experiment of a constantly accelerating elevator with a pinhole in the side through which a light beam could shine to illustrate the effect of gravity on light.

Jeffrey A. Tucker: Ten Points About Post-Lockdown Economics

The sudden economic lockdown of March 2020, the world over, was one of the more shocking moments in history. The very core of the economic problem from the beginning of recorded time was getting more of what people needed to them in a way that was sustainable given the inherent scarcities of the state of nature.

Regardless of the system, creating wealth was the stated goal, and humanity gradually discovered that trade, investment, marketing, and access to more via travel and creativity was the way forward.

David Farrar: Educating Duncan

Ben Thomas writes:

Seymour told the committee he used a working definition of regulation as “rules which restrict the use of private property”, causing Labour MP Duncan Webb to demand how rules like, say, clean air quality which did not relate to private property or money fit in.

Peter Winsley: The Green Party’s plans for public and private lands

The Green Party wants to facilitate the transfer of more public (or “Crown”) and private land to iwi, hapū, and whānau. The intent is to address inequities arising from Māori land loss, especially in the 19th century.

The New Zealand Constitution Act 1986 marks the point that Parliament became sovereign and the British Crown’s role became limited to the procedural and symbolic. “The Crown” in practical terms means all New Zealanders, or at least their elected members of Parliament. Whatever costs “the Crown” incurs in Tiriti-related processes are paid for by New Zealanders, not by King Charles.

Peter Winsley: Education as Master, not Servant of Artificial Intelligence

Knowledge accumulated over Generations

When past social or technological advances are discussed young people sometimes disclaim all knowledge and remark “I wasn’t alive then”, as if nothing can be known without having been lived through. This is not Hayek’s “pretense of knowledge” so much as the misguided view that nothing is real except what you have seen, touched and can vouch for in person. In fact, learning accumulates and is passed on through the generations. For example, a first-year university Mathematics student stands on the shoulders of generations of mathematicians from many cultures. The known evidence suggests that mathematics originated in Mesopotamia in around 3000BC and advanced greatly within the Islamic world of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, “but I cannot say for sure because I wasn’t alive then”.

John Miltimore - Cornell University Physician: I Was Wrong about Covid Vaccine Mandates

The great martial artist Bruce Lee reputedly said that all mistakes are forgivable—if one has the courage to admit the mistake.

Paul Fenyves, a primary care physician in New York City who specializes in internal medicine, seems to have learned this lesson. Fenyves, a primary care doctor at Weill Cornell Medicine, recently admitted he was wrong to support vaccine mandates.

“I was initially supportive of Covid vaccine mandates in the Fall of 2021. At the time, I was told that Covid vaccines don’t only protect the individual receiving the vaccine, but they also benefit the community by reducing spread of the virus,” Fenyves wrote on the Substack Sensible Medicine.

Mike Hosking: Economics of idiots causing labour shortage

The statistic that should send a chill through every one of us was the one you might have seen over the weekend from a construction company.

They hired 52 people, but lost 54 to poaching.

It's that fundamentally destructive aspect of the economy that has seen us almost certainly in a recession in the first half of this year, and quite possibly another one in the latter part of this year and into next.

The economy is broken, it can't function without enough people and we don’t have enough people.

Mike Hosking: The Government are digging a deeper financial hole

As schools return, let’s begin the term with a little Economics 101.

When you artificially inject yourself into an economy with the view to helping people out financially, what do you do?

Do you:

Dr Dennis Wesselbaum: Economics in the New Zealand media: a requiem

The media has largely ignored economics in the last couple of years. The return of inflation, however, has brought economic topics back into people’s minds and into media coverage.

The discussions surrounding the Budget were a low point in the reporting on economics, in my opinion. You might think that experts on, say, fiscal policy would be included in these Budget discussions. However, the Newshub “expert” panel consisted of a journalist (Dita de Boni), a sociologist (Dr. Ella Henry), and an economist (Shamubeel Eaqub), who quickly disqualified himself from being considered an expert.

In response to David Seymour’s comment that government spending drives inflation, Eaqub called Seymour “economically illiterate.” However, among serious economists, there is no disagreement that government spending is a key driver of inflation. In fact, it is what students of economics learn in their first year.

Daniel J. Mitchell - Comparing the Economic Growth of East Germany to West Germany: A History Lesson

Donald Trump is an incoherent mix of good policies and bad policies.
Some of his potential 2020 opponents, by contrast, are coherent but crazy.
And economic craziness exists in other nations as well.

Socialism Ruined East Germany

In a column for the New York Times, Jochen Bittner writes about how a rising star of Germany’s Social Democrat Party wants the type of socialism that made former East Germany an economic failure.