Good economics and entertaining as well: go to the Drew Carey video here.
Posted by Harry Messenheimer
Archive for category Economics
It’s Time for Socialism
Jun 23
Time for socialism: how to make us all worse off.
Posted by Harry Messenheimer
Maybe we can create diesel fuel for $50 per barrel! All that is needed is sugar cane and “bugs that excrete petrol.” From the Times Online (London):
“Ten years ago I could never have imagined I’d be doing this,” says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive, as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. “I mean, this is essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to – especially the ones coming out of business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants to get into.”
He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They excrete crude oil.
Notice that no government directives or subsidies are required.
Hat tip to Arnold Kling who also notes that we actually throw up a barrier to this kind of entepreneurial activity by putting a substantial tariff on Brazilian sugar cane.
Fudge or Free Markets
Jun 11
Iain Murray at National Review Online wrote an interesting piece about the Lieberman-Warner energy bill.
The collapse last week of the Lieberman-Warner bill, the enviro-Left’s attempt to bribe Senators to impose energy rationing on the nation, shows that we are now left with only two energy-policy choices: We can adopt fudging issues as a policy, which will achieve nothing, hurt many, and satisfy no one; or we can pursue a free-market policy that will anger green activists and alarmists but actually do some good. Chances are that fudge is on the menu.
How did we get here? To answer that question, a look at the recently failed policy proposal is instructive. The Boxer Amendment — all 490 pages of it — to the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act sought to reduce U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions by instituting a “cap-and-trade” regime to make energy use more expensive. Leaving aside the folly of proposing this at a time when Americans are hurting from steeply rising energy prices, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chair Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.) and her well-funded environmental-movement allies realized that they could not sell this scheme without massive bribery.
The Act would have raised about $7 trillion in new government revenues and funded over $4 trillion in new government programs (yes, that’s trillion, with a “t”). Some of that money would have paid for the support of special interests that might be hurt most by the Act. Other portions of it would go toward new handouts to the rapidly growing environmental-industrial complex of rent-seeking “green” businesses and their consultants from the advocacy movement.
However, even with those provisions, Sen. Boxer and Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) could not find 50, never mind 60, votes to compel an up-and-down vote on Lieberman-Warner. Of the 48 votes they managed to scrape together, several senators said after the vote that, while they supported voting on the bill, they would not have voted for it as it stood because it directly harmed their constituents. This shows that there is little political will for any policy with a large price tag on it for consumers. This is likely to hold true even if Democrats increase their majorities on Congress in this year’s elections.
So what are we left with? If there is an appetite to “do something” about global warming, what could get through Congress? There appear to be two options.
Read the rest here.
Yes, thanks to world leaders (including our own) we are all worse off. The hungry will be getting hungrier.
Posted by Harry Messenheimer
Reducing the threat of prosperity while making bears worse off at the same time — read about it here.
Hat tip: Instapundit
Posted by Harry Messenheimer
The first has to do with how ethanol has muscled out alternative uses of farm land:
Thanks to government for higher food prices and damage to the environment. Your tax dollars at work.
The second has to do with the recent media’s trumpeting of high jobless claims. It turns out that the raw numbers of jobless claims are higher indeed but they are below average as a percentage of the labor force. (Shaded areas represent past recessions.)
Thanks to the media’s misleading numbers we have been entertained with another jobless “crisis.” BTW, to the extent that jobless claims are on the rise you might give some thought to recent and forthcoming (next month) increases in the minimum wage.
Mark Perry is a very good economist. You can find more of his useful insights daily here.
Posted by Harry Messenheimer
Bringing Home the Bacon
Jun 8
Congrats to our congress critters! We rank number two in ripping off the other 49. Only Alaska does better.
Hat tip: Newmark’s Door w/ link via Instapundit.
Posted by Harry Messenheimer
Cartoon of the Day
Jun 5
As predicted, our thirst for ethanol is causing others to hunger for food. An article by Leigh Phillips at EUobserver:
A UN summit in Rome gathering together world leaders and food and agriculture experts has seen a showdown on EU and US biofuels policies and agricultural subsidies.
One UN official called the policies “incomprehensible,” while development organisations and the biofuels industry campaigned fiercely to try to influence the meeting’s outcome.
In an impassioned speech, Jacques Diouf, the director-general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation told some 60 heads of state that it is “incomprehensible…that subsidies worth €7-8 billion ($11-12 billion) in 2006 were used to divert 100 million tonnes of cereals from human consumption mostly to satisfy a thirst for fuels for vehicles.”
Read the whole article here.