Topic: Economic Education

Don’t Expand Deposit Insurance. Abolish It!

– April 1, 2023

“Deposit insurance creates perverse incentives that weaken market discipline and encourage excessive risk-taking. Expanding deposit insurance will only make these problems worse.” ~ Bryan P. Cutsinger

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Signs of Hope

– March 30, 2023

“The happy reality that entrepreneurship and bourgeois commerce continue to flourish was driven home to me by my rather unremarkable remodeling project. I have reason for optimism.” ~ Donald J. Boudreaux

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Lessons from the Phillips Curve

– March 29, 2023

“The exploration of the Phillips Curve has taken many different paths and yet somehow ended up in the same place. The world could have been spared much of this meandering with a more firm grounding in what theory does and does not tell us.” ~ Joshua R. Hendrickson

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Why Progressive Taxes Are Especially Harmful to Productivity and Harm the Poor

– March 28, 2023

“‘Progressive’ taxes impose a particularly strong disincentive for more productive work. Depriving the economy of greater productivity curtails the alleviation of poverty, and as a result disproportionately harms the poor.” ~ Brian Balfour

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How Does a Region Rust Away?

– March 28, 2023

“Where people cannot get jobs or find homes, they pick up and leave. Where they find homes and jobs, they stay. This is not an excuse for complacency. Many of the policies that drove industrious work away from the Rust Belt remain politically popular at a national level.” ~ David Gillette & Thaddeus C. Meadows

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A Revolution in Public Transportation From A Town You Wouldn’t Expect

– March 27, 2023

“It’s taken more than a hundred years for low-density cities to recognize that public transportation works far better in a point-to-point model, using private-public partnerships.” ~ Craig J. Richardson

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When Can Waffle House Raise its Prices?

– March 27, 2023

“Instead of being evidence that markets are ‘no longer controlled by competition,’ firms raising prices together is evidence of supply and demand at work.” ~ Brian C. Albrecht

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Do Not Tarry In Eliminating Tariffs and Other Protectionist Measures

– March 25, 2023

“Like Adam Smith, I’d prefer that trade be liberalized gradually as opposed to not at all. But perhaps unlike him, if I were put in front of a button to eliminate immediately all species of economic protectionism, I’d press it with gusto.” ~ Donald J. Boudreaux

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Economic Development Deals Are a Curse, Not a Blessing

– March 24, 2023

“Bribing businesses to locate in your state is not free enterprise; it’s a form of cronyism. It turns what should be a competitive process between firms into a political competition between states. The first step toward winning is to stop losing.” ~ Stephen C. Miller

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Some Buttons That I’d Not Push, and Some That I Would Push

– March 20, 2023

“There are, undoubtedly, still other unwise government interventions that I would wish to eliminate, but that I would also not willingly push a button to eliminate immediately. But there are buttons I would push.” ~ Donald J. Boudreaux

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Minimum Wage Hurts Whom It Claims to Help

– March 19, 2023

“Being able to work, and feel productive, is an important part of the social aspect of our economy. Service jobs are disappearing fast enough, without having the process accelerated by misguided support for increasing the minimum wage.” ~ Michael C. Munger

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