Or, to quote Hayek, as socialists of all parties.
David Levenstam
In a message dated 9/3/03 3:57:29 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
And with the budget under the Bush Administration outsocializing the
socialist Clinton by triple and growing (in social spending alone) it isn't
clear that there
In a message dated 9/4/03 8:38:09 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Illegals knowingly break federal law. Many libertarians say they only break
laws that shouldn't exist anyway. But this made me wonder. The overwhelming
majority of illegal immigrants do not have libertarians views (to put it
mildly).
In a message dated 9/4/03 11:03:22 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
No, this is a very serious point. Republican administrations are by
objective measure MORE socialist. Fundamentally, conservatives in this
country do not believe more in individual freedom than liberals. They
repeatedly seek
Yes, an consciously so. While I think it's clear that Republicans generally
push for much less government than Democrats do, I also think you're
disinclined to accept what seems manifest to me, and since as you know I haven't slept
much for the past 10 days, I don't have the energy to write a
People probably came to and went from Iceland much more frequently than we
might presuppose. People traveled among Iceland and the continent (Norway
primarily), Greenland and Vineland quite a bit, according to the available sources,
until the Little Ice Age set in during the Middle Ages. Under
Dear Fred,
I have a conservative Christian friend in Iowa who supports the laws against
drug use but will that they violate our God-given right to liberty. He says
he's just not emotionally prepared to abandon his support for drug prohibition.
That seems like a fairly clear cause of conscious
In a message dated 10/31/03 12:21:31 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
So why not just use federal paper dollars for that?
Because if you get caught, you'll pay for it. In case of local currency,
the tax authorities do not bother as easily because of the cost and the
trouble with drawing the line
In a message dated 12/2/03 11:48:08 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
If you measure wages in desk calculators instead of dollars, I'm sure
they've gone up substantially! ;-)
--Robert
Yes, the BLS series uses CPI-u to deflate the nominal wage series. Since
CPI-u doesn't account for changes in
In a message dated 12/3/03 1:53:31 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
This is completely wrong. The CPI-u is, and the CPI-x was, adjusted
for
quality changes (see http://www.bls.gov/cpi/home.htm ). The CPI-X
doesn't exist anymore.
So what price statistic wasn't adjusted for quality changes?
They
In a message dated 12/7/03 4:03:55 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
So the question is, why at the zero rate was there not greater demand to
borrow? The answer may well be that the expected future inflation and
real
interest rates were highly uncertain, and the transaction costs of getting
and
In a message dated 12/7/03 12:40:04 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Your story does have a certain plausibility. But you'd need to argue that
the huge increase in IQ that has been documented during this last century
isn't really an increase in intelligence. And doing that makes it harder
to take
Speaking of December 2003 and January 2004, in the spirit of all the
predictions made each year at this time by media talking heads I'd like to make the
following equally insightful predictions:
In 2004, the world will experience an earthquake, a flood, and some sunny
days. The US Post Office
In a message dated 1/13/04 4:08:31 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
What would you suggest? How can I demonstrate, in a
relatively short period of time, that imposing equal
wages isn't the best way to organize the world?
I used to do this all the time with my students in history classes at Iowa.
In a message dated 1/14/04 11:16:54 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
In my view, there's nothing like real numbers to get your brain juices
flowing. Note the $20-30 million that the Fed pays to the US Treasury
each year. Exercise for the reader: why does it make that payment?
-gil
The
In a message dated 1/20/04 7:10:03 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
AdmrlLocke wrote:
People who engage in more sexual activity and
alternative sexual lifestyles might feel less
embarassed about admitting to auto-erotica than
others, so the results might contain a great deal of
skew.
But should we
I've seen almost exactly the same distribution. As a first impression, I
wonder if the Nigeria scam doesn't employ the same anonymity (from the other
side) that recipients of the first three types of emails value. Tracking down a
scam online might well prove more difficult than doing so over the
In a message dated 1/21/04 3:34:42 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
I was so ignorant, until last month I thought Paris Hilton was a
hotel in France
;-)
Paris Hilton is both a hotel in France AND desert topping! (from an old
Saturday Night Live skit it's both a floor wax AND a desert topping!)
Wow, I was going to respond that I've almost never gotten an email for
insurance, and then decided not to clutter up the list. When I checked my new mail
again, however, I found an ad for insurance! That reminded me that in fact I
have gotten many emails, mostly for cheap health insurance.
Um, who says the male libido decreases over the 20s and 30s? :-D
David Levenstam
In a message dated 1/28/04 3:05:00 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Following the analogy of price control, any evidence that the group
advocating
aggressive relationship bargining are the same ones who would
What about the person, like an alcoholic or schizophrenic, who hates his
extreme preferences, as they destroy his life? Setting aside the issue of
involuntary treatment for the benefit of others, as we really talking only about a
case of extreme preference?
David Levenstam
In a message dated
In a message dated 8/1/04 3:45:57 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Economists are not hostile to public goods.
Still, knowledge of economics tends to make you more receptive to the
idea of the invisible hand and the possibilities of private economic
organization. Hence, it makes you more
I've been discussing with my undergradute students the rationality of voting.
People might get other benefits from voting besides thinking that their one
vote can influence the outcome. Some people feel a civic pride in voting.
Others vote to prevent others from telling them they don't have a
In a message dated 8/31/04 8:36:29 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
A problem with many of these reasons is that they do partly rely on the
illusion that their vote does matter! Expressive voting is not a
completely separate issue. Why feel pride in participating in an irrational
system? Why not
In a message dated 11/3/04 6:54:43 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
In the end the important question is comparative - are there any other
institutions that on average do better? So far direction comparisons
between markets and other institutions in the field have favored
markets. And real and
In a message dated 11/12/04 1:42:43 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
What's up with question 32? 52% male and 52% female?
Well maybe 4 percent of them were hermaphrodites. I see that at the
university where I'm teaching (NOT GMU) they're having a seminar on people who
aren't
100% male or
In a message dated 2/7/05 11:46:21 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
There's an interesting (to me, anyway) interview with Arthur Laffer
here:
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/opinion/columnists/steigerwald/s_300457.html
--Robert
Oh, thank goodness! When I saw the subject line I
In a message dated 2/8/05 1:13:22 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
In a message dated 2/7/05 11:46:21 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
There's an interesting (to me, anyway) interview with Arthur Laffer
here:
http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/opinion/columnists/steigerwald/s_3
In a message dated 4/18/05 3:21:40 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
I've been reading about Laffer's idea that there is a tendency for
revenues to increase with increased taxation up to a point where revenue
is maximized. As one of the class notes on Caplan's site indicates, you
can derive
In a message dated 4/19/05 12:43:11 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
For what it's worth, I recall a Treasury study in the late 1980s that
concluded that the tax cut of 1984 was 95% self-financing.
David
Do you have a citation for that study (or a copy)?
If "95% self-financing" means what it
In a message dated 4/21/05 1:37:25 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
By one measure, there is a big difference, in per capita GDP taking into account purchasing power parity. From the OECD site, in 1999 the U.S. had a per capita GDP of $33,836. Germany, France, UK, Italy were all between
In a message dated 4/21/05 1:38:10 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
And I have a sneaking suspicion that more equitable distributions of
income lead to less social conflict and rent seeking and lead to higher
growth. Unlike you I can point to some theoretical and empirical
studies that back my
In a message dated 4/21/05 12:26:02 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
And I have a sneaking suspicion that more equitable distributions of
income lead to less social conflict and rent seeking and lead to higher
growth.
I wonder what the Laffer Curve would have to say about the "tax" rates and
In a message dated 4/22/05 9:55:30 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Quoting [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
istribution. The real question, according to
McCloskey, is not why does Germany have only 75% of US per capital
GDP, but why
does Bangledesh have only 5% of US per capital GDP. People in the
In a message dated 4/23/05 4:42:26 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Peter C. McCluskey wrote:
Mancur Olson claims in his book Power and Prosperity that the
marginal income tax rate was effectively zero. The effective taxes
were near 100% of what a typical worker in any given position could
In a message dated 4/29/05 2:05:25 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
David ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) writes:
It's funny, during the 1970s people commonly attributed the
excellent rates of economic grown in Taiwan and Hong Kong to the
"Confusion work ethic" while completely ignoring the poverty of the
Are there any armchair economists left? If so, what do you think of the following article?
Thanks!
David Levenstam
George Mason University
-
Interest rates and housing
Bruce Bartlett (archive)
August 16, 2005 | Print | Recommend to a friend
Last week the Federal
In a message dated 8/16/05 10:24:56 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
The last real estate bottom was in 1990, so if this
is another 18-year cycle, the next depression would be
around 2008. So far, the economy is tracking the
cycle right on schedule. In my judgment, the economy
is entering the
In a message dated 8/18/05 11:28:53 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
--- Technotranscendence [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
there are political cycles too, such as the
Presidential cycle. Yet this doesn't line up with
18-years.
Yes, there several cycles going on at the same time.
There are also
In a message dated 8/18/05 11:40:59 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
If government has caused a real estate price
bubble by artificially
lowering interest rates, how can it have an 18-year
cycle,
David
Because real estate construction takes years, and
recovery from a downturn takes years.
An
Woo-hoo! Congratulations Bryan!
Does this award come with pecunitary compensation? :-D
David
In a message dated 8/24/05 3:15:24 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
I must gleefully report that I am one of the winners of the 2005 Thomas
S. Szasz Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Cause of
In a message dated 9/6/05 8:50:04 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
I'm not sure the premise is entirely correct. About 30% of the
(former?) population of New Orleans is below the federal poverty line,
yet 80-90%
The federal poverty line is just a politically-determined level at one time useful
In a message dated 11/29/05 11:47:15 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
In the inside cover of the principles book by Tollison, Ekelund and Ressler, they show average hourly earnings in 1964 at $11.88. For 2004, they have $15.64. I think they are using 2002 as the base year, but it is not clear
Dear Tom,
Thank you very much for the links. It seems I can find median age, but not mean age. Perhaps nobody calculates the means.
David
In a message dated 4/27/06 6:07:33 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
U.S. Census Bureau is likely to be the best source. Here’s a link to a table from
This suggests that people might include the safety of others in their utility functions. An alternative explanation might suggest that people include a calcuation of the damages they'll have to pay if they injure someone else.
Giving women even more space than non-helmeted men raises some
I was watching the local news last night as they covered Thanksgiving night
shopping stories in the DC metro area. Apparently some stores opened last
night to start off the Christmas shopping season and hundreds of people lined
up
at one store for six hours or more. About 50 people showed
Journalists and Democrats blame Republican policies, but I don't know which
policies and I suspect neither do the journalists or Democrats.
Xenophobes blame Mexican immigrants, foreign competition, and outsourcing of
phone jobs to people in other countries.
Referring to the same claim made by
I have mentioned two factors in response to your earlier emails and got no
response, so perhaps my message didn't go through. One factor regards the
question of what they're measuring--money wage versus total employee
compensation.
The non-wage component of total employee compensation has
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