Economics

Money Matters

This entry was posted in Economics on by

Learn all about the new $50 bill via this nifty interactive tutorial. There is also one for the $20 bill.
For more, head over to Marginal Revolution where Tyler Cowan provides some historical background on currency and answers this question: What if modern technology made counterfeiting unstoppable?
Meanwhile, use cash: disintermediate the credit card providors and, if you will, take as many of your transactions as you can off the surveillance grid (be it marketing folks, or….).
Oh yea, it is faster and more fun to pay with cash!
Interactive stuff via The Presurfer (sorry, no permalinks).

End the Dole

This entry was posted in Business US Capitalism Constitution Economics Federal Government Libertarianism Taxation World Affairs on by

I’m not a big fan of the WTO. Amongst other issues I have the WTO seems to operate behind a mask of secrecy that might even make the bush administration blush. However, there may be some positives:

When the US government gives away some $4 billion to American cotton farmers in return for a crop that’s valued at only $3 billion, something’s amiss.
…
And cotton subsidies are just a portion of the $19 billion that the federal government pays to boost US agriculture and its exports each year.
…….
This week, the Geneva-based World Trade Organization made a preliminary ruling that the United States must end cotton subsidies because they distort global trade.
…..
The WTO, which the US helped create as a way for consumers to benefit from open markets, has dealt a blow to the biggest stumbling block to expanded trade. Governments in rich nations need to use this ruling to persuade domestic farm lobbies that they can no longer delay the inevitable: no subsidies, only free competition.

It should not need WTO rulings to help persuade farm lobbies that the time for subsidies have ended. The people funding the subsidies should just say no!
Yep, that’s you and me paying these subsidies via taxes.
Update (4/29): Jane Galt has some good words about this ruling.

Still Visible

This entry was posted in Blogging Capitalism Economics Libertarianism on by

At the top of the right side bar you will find an entry for The Invisible Adjunct under Top Referrers. The site won’t be there next time. You may remember that I mentioned a while back that she was closing up shop.
Well, it is pretty clear that she is gone but not forgotten. This article in The Chronicle of Higher Education provides an interesting profile of the real invisible adjunct and her academic world:

The mystery surrounding her identity was part of what made her blog work. In a way, she stopped being just herself, transformed instead into Every Adjunct. Knowing who she was might have broken that spell.

Read it!
Via Crooked Timber where Henry Farrell uses her story as a stepping off point to a rant about The Calvinist illusion is that luck has nothing to do with it – markets reward virtue.
Most interesting is that Henry makes this point:

Calvinists sought evidence that they were favoured by God through accumulating goods without consuming them. If you did well in worldly affairs, you could take this as a sign of God�s favour.
This may or may not be a good historical explanation. Still, it captures a set of attitudes expounded by some (although certainly not all) exponents of free markets. In many important respects, markets are political creations – they reflect differences in the bargaining power of different social groups.

Seems to me that most serious free market proponents would agree with Henry that markets today, and for the past couple hundered years, are indeed political creations. They would go one step beyond and say that this is a major problem that we should be working to eliminate.

Pricing Gas

This entry was posted in Capitalism Economics Energy Marketing on by

Via Scott here is a map of gasoline prices populated with blogger provided info. I note that the price recently posted for Houston is only $1.60/gallon.
I often use gasbuddy to find a low price. Their Houston page shows someone paying 1.55/Gal as recently as last night.
Last week in Canada I paid $0.855(Can)/Liter which works out to about $2.36(US)/gal at the then current exchange rate. I made sure I arrived back in the states with a near empty tank so I could pay $1.989(US)/gal and was quite happy.