In the aftermath of Hamas's taking hostages in its conflict with Israel, the question arises: Who pays the ransom? State-financed payments lead to the worst outcomes and create moral hazards.
Original Article: Hostage Extraction Needs to be Privatized
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Bad, Worse, Worst: The Misguided Perfectionism of Gavin Newsom
2023-11-11
My grandfather used to sing to me, “Good, better, best / never let them rest / till the good is better / and the better is best.” I appreciated that lesson and have been applying it to try to make sense of a recent bill signed by California governor Gavin Newsom. While the bill may be the result of Newsom’s grandfather singing to him about “bad, worse, and worst,” I have determined it is more likely a case of bad/worse/worst economic thinking. It exposes a level of bad that most economic teachers likely never bother to discuss.
AB 1228 is an unusually precise and dramatic bill related to the minimum wage. Currently, the minimum wage in California is $15.50 per hour. This bill raises the minimum wage to twenty dollars per hour for employees who specifically work in fast-food restaurants
False Virtue: The Life and Death of “American Exceptionalism”
2023-11-09
The impending decline of the dollar is apparently imposing a real Halloween scare on the American foreign policy establishment. An August 22, 2023, article on the Council on Foreign Relations website entitled “The Future of Dollar Hegemony” explained that
the dollar’s global hegemony gives the U.S. government power to impose crippling sanctions and wage other forms of financial welfare against adversaries. . . . In 2022, more than twelve thousand entities were under sanction by the Treasury Department, a more than twelve-fold increase since the turn of the century. U.S. sanctions . . . do ensure that targeted adversaries pay a significant price for continuing to engage in actions the United States opposes (emphasis added).
This reminds yours truly of a very memorable bumper sticker that
Is Migration a Tool of the Consumptive Class?
2023-11-06
Migration is part of the wider concept of economic freedom. This makes it desirable if prosperity is the goal of policy. But more applicable to the current attitudes and values of Western leaders than mundane economic arguments, migration presents an opportunity to increase the pool from which they extract real income. This is required in the face of poor demographics and growing socialistic ambitions.
The extraction is achieved by taxation and inflation, which create huge costs to the productive sector regardless of its makeup. In this sense, any large-scale migration is likely to be an example of states coming to the right answer in the wrong way.
Factors Seek the Highest Rent
The mobility of factors of production is always desirable. Migration is simply the mobility of labor over
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