Drip Drip Drip

I often offer this video as an explanation for why "price gouging" should be allowed, especially after a natural disaster. One reason I like it is that it sets up the question under the most dire circumstances: There's a natural disaster and a mother goes out to find a generator to run the refrigerator that keeps her daughter's insulin. She finds that the only generators available are now 3x the price. The best argument the video makes for allowing prices to rise freely as scarcity increases is that it allows people who need the item the most to stake their claim for it over people who need it the least. When a limited resource is under-priced (relative to its scarcity), it is only natural that consumers will use up every little bit of it so it will not be available at all to more people who need it the most. As the video points out, settting a low price ceiling on resource when it is limited means that people don't have to be stingy in using the resource. ...

Capitalism is a loaded word. It means a lot of things to a lot of different people. In a practical sense, Capitalism is the freedom to do what you want with your own property, your own labor, your own intelligence. In it's purest form, you can do this without anyone (church, mayor, social justice warrior) looking over your shoulder to see if what you are doing is "fair".  In a free trade system, the only people deciding whether the deal is fair is the buyer and the seller. I 'm going to leave aside the question of whether oversight is necessary in practice. I'm going only talk about a benefit that free trade produces in a society. How many, for the sake of charity, would serve refreshing beverages to strangers -- not just for a weekend, but for scores of hours every week for years. Yet Starbucks has enticed people to do just that for the sake of ...what shall we call it? Greed? Ambition? A desire to thrive and to take part in the luxuries of modern life? Als...

I thought of this upon hearing comedienne Sarah Silverman talking on NPR's Fresh Air show. "My dad raised us to respect taxes and know that its an honor to pay taxes. And it goes to people who need it, and highways, and schools, and that's what makes our country great, and the more successful you are the more you can put into the ante..into the middle..to help make our local communities and our bigger communities great." This is a new thing among Democrats, this tender soft-spot for taxes--taxes for their own sake, ignoring any specific program--because we're suppose to accept that the programs receiving the dollars are worthwhile without consideration. I've recently heard Chris Hardwick, Jon Stewart, and David Letterman apologize for making jokes at expense of the IRS. The IRS! To be frank, there's something unAmerican about that, and I don't use that word lightly as does Harry, Reid , Nancy Pelosi , Dick Durban , and Barack Obama . The sh...

From... Self-driving cars, opportunity costs and idle gold You'll have to register to read it. "We argued...that the economics of self-driving taxis don’t necessarily make sense.Which is to say, we’re not entirely convinced (at this stage) that self-driving taxis will be any more or less affordable than those driven by humans. " That is irrelevant. The economic value of self-driving cars is that people who are currently driving taxis will do something else productive that can't be automated right now... Likely something that is either not being done now or is under-served based on the desire of the public. We should hope that self-driving taxis WILL (without general inflation or legal mandates) become increasingly expensive because that means that the value (productivity) of those hired trips is increasing. People freely pay for things only if they think the money they have is less valuable than the thing they want. I think the misconception is this: The writ...