…every socialist experiment is a bright new dawn in the beginning and then a “that’s not real socialism!” hellscape a few years later. Russia, China, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Nicaragua — all hailed by socialists in the beginning, then ignored or dismissed once the results became visible.
Category: Economics
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Joins Employers Dropping College Degree Requirements
Let Housing Markets Work
Two stalled developments in New York City demonstrate a flawed approach to affordability. By demanding affordable “set-asides,” the city forces market-rate units to subsidize low-rent ones.
Natural Gas, Electricity, and Thermodynamics
As long as natural gas is used to generate electricity, bans on natural gas use in new residential construction result in reductions in CO2 emissions only if very high efficiency heat pumps are used and only if combined cycle rather than simple gas turbines are used for generation. All other uses of electricity actually increase emissions because of the heat losses in electricity generation. So why are localities in Blue America banning natural gas?
https://www.cato.org/blog/natural-gas-electricity-thermodynamics
Four Ways to Get What You Want
You can make something yourself, someone can give it to you as a gift, you can steal it, or you can trade for it. Doing it yourself is fun sometimes, but unless you’re doing it recreationally, DIY is the road to poverty and starvation.
California’s Floods Another Reminder of Failed Water Management Policies
In drought or flood, bad environmental policy is making Californians miserable.
The West Needs Water Markets
People in the West want more water than is available. Who should decide who gets the water they want? That really is the wrong question.
Wage and Price Controls Are Not the Answer to Inflation
Price controls have been thoroughly debunked by history and economic theory. In fact, one of the first lessons in a standard freshman introductory microeconomics class is explaining how controls on prices (and wages, hereinafter, just “price controls”) cause shortages and surpluses.
Baseball, Taxes, and Apple Pie
What economists call the “tax wedge” is the gap between what an employer pays for an employee’s services and what the employee receives after taxes. It causes some jobs to disappear entirely, as employees and employers may not be able to agree on a wage once taxes are taken out of the paycheck. It causes some employees to flee to lower‐tax countries, states, or cities.
Generalizing the Lesson
I mean, maybe it should be okay for people to arrange and sell flowers to willing buyers without anyone being branded a criminal in the process, but how far can we take that lesson? Anytime you take an option away, for some people, it will have been the best option they had available to them. Take that choice away, and they don’t substitute it with whatever you thought was better for them. It just leaves them with nothing.