20 Questions to ponder over the holiday weekend.

While reading one of Donald Boudreaux’s more recent AIER articles, I couldn’t help but experience the sensation of Deja Vu. As I made it through his 20 questions, I felt like I was rereading several exchanges I’ve had with friends over the past several months. I am actually quite certain that if I scroll through some of older text messages, at least half of the questions have been raised and discussed across my circle of friends. 16 hits particularly close to home as I’ve recently relocated and had to spend the better half of a day at the OMV. I have included a few of my favorites below.

2. Why do so many American Progressives wish to put even larger swathes of our lives under political control given their belief that politics is so very easily corrupted by oligarchs and big-money donors?

13. Why do so many American conservatives boast about the strength of America and the resilience and greatness of her people but insist also that to allow these same American people to freely purchase goods and services supplied by low-productivity (and, thus, low-wage) foreign workers paves a sure path to America’s impoverishment and demise?

16. Why do so many Americans, across most of the ideological space, who have ever waited in a line at the Department of Motor Vehicles to renew a driver’s license or to register a vehicle, or who have suffered long delays in a cavernous passport-control room to reenter the country after traveling abroad, want to turn over to the same institution that is responsible for the inefficiencies regularly on display in those government offices more control over our lives?

Hooray Beer

Art Carden pens an interesting article about the importance of decentralized knowledge and market feedback in the production of beer. While the article focuses on making better beer, I think his observations can be applied to the economy at large. I have included Mr. Carden’s parting shot below.

A government could, undoubtedly, make beer. But the right beer with the right flavor profiles for a world of nearly infinite variety of tastes — not all of them consistent? For that, you need a market.

Please use the comment sections to share your thoughts on the article or related content.

Cheers,

A break from all the Economic Mishigas

With all the economic mishigas dominating news cycle, I thought it was worth sharing a couple of articles that I have recently come across on the topic.

I found myself enjoying Donald Boudreaux’s Op-Ed in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. His tongue-in-cheek response to a reader’s email argues that capitalism is alive and well despite the headlines. I have included an excerpt below.

In the morning, my correspondent likely drinks coffee brewed from beans grown in Colombia or Ethiopia. For lunch, he eats a chicken sandwich or a quinoa-and-beet salad. Each of these foods is made available to him only through the efforts of countless strangers — producers such as chicken farmers, beet growers, truck drivers, insurance-company actuaries — spread across the globe and connected to him by a thick web of consensual capitalist acts of commerce.

Mike Munger’s American Institute for Economic Research article makes a rational appeal for capitalism. The entire article is worth the read, but I have included the crux of his argument below.

There are three elements to the argument for capitalism, and while they connect in crucial ways they can be separately defined. Those three elements are (a) division of labor; (b) impersonal exchange based on prices; and (3) economies of scale based on knowledge.