Entries from January 2009 ↓

Strikes against foreign labour in Britain

Against most conventional wisdom, the UK has traditionally been one of the biggest believers in the European principles of free movement of goods, labour, and capital. Strikes against foreign labour and the governments scared patronising of such sentiment tarnishes such a reputation.

This hostility towards foreigns and free trade seems a bit, well, French.

Love doesn’t scale as an economic solution.

– Eric Raymond in Econtalk

I don’t want to go to any conference that accepts my paper.

In October, my bank was offering a risk-free 90 day savings vehicle at 5.5% (annualised)! This smelt of despair for capital, but since it’s guaranteed, I took it.

It’s now down to a still high, but more believable, 3.5%

Will Wilkinson points us to Ed Glaser’s essay on libertarian progressivism.

I have often made the case for a libertarian welfare state, one with little bureaucracy and vouchers+hard cash, allied with strong economic liberties. I think that modern day Sweden is moving to this ideal (private social security, school vouchers,…).

A libertarian welfare state, not a contradiction.

1. Writes Megan McArdle about the NY Times:

And Felix is right on when he points out that for a long, long time, articles on swinging into spring with patent leather have been subsidizing coverage of less-popular-yet-more-vital topics like foreign policy and the Department of Agriculture. The web is rapidly disaggregating the readers, and hence the subsidy. And that’s a big problem for society. One for which so far, no one has proposed any very satisfactory solution.

That’s true. On the other hand, the web has made the market more of a winner-take-all market. I wouldn’t be surprised that as smaller newspapers close down (witness the desperate moves of the Detroit Free Press) or become more local (like many European local newspapers who don’t make a pretense of covering news beyond their city and co-exist instead of competing with real newspapers), the NY Times becomes more and more dominant as the single national player.

Right now, there’s over-supply in the industry as a whole. All the players are losing money, but the best positioned might still come out ahead if they stick it out.

I am a Christian myself, I just happen to dress well.

— Coupling

Starting about a year ago, I started buying CDs again. Mostly because it’s just simpler to pay ten measly bucks than to try to find anything good in an easy format.

Oi Va Voi is the best CD I bought in a while. Like if Air got together with Kraftwerk to form a Klezmer band in Easter Europe.

You will hear Keynesians cry over the “lost output” that results from having unemployment. That is somewhat misleading. The reason we are getting less output from home builders, mortgage securitizers, and auto makers is that we do not want so much of from them. Putting them back to work doing stuff people don’t want may produce output in an accounting sense, but in economic terms it is still lost output.

Arnold Kling

The Environmental Working Group has just issued a report that finds that 75 percent of all renewable fuels tax subsidies in 2007 went to environmentally damaging corn-ethanol production.

(R. Baley via Daily Dish)

I could also call this “Public Choice 101: How the Way to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions.”