Topic: Free Markets

Commoditizing Excess Capacity

– March 18, 2024

“If all the cars, and apartments, have people using them, and all the tools have people making things with them, we will need far fewer of those things. We have ‘enough’ stuff, it’s just in the closet.” ~Michael Munger

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DOJ Makes Our Skies Less Friendly

– March 6, 2024

“The damage done by allowing ‘anticompetitive’ mergers dissipates over time, but the benefits of erroneously prohibiting beneficial ones are lost forever.” ~Tarnell Brown

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Wendy’s Won’t Use Dynamic Pricing – But Should They?

– March 4, 2024

“The discount shelf in your lower supermarket is emblematic of the same process as well, albeit in the opposite direction. Variable pricing permits improved resource allocations, including of labor, by responding to real-time conditions.” ~Peter C. Earle

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Beware of the Ceiling

– March 1, 2024

“Alas, most voters are ignorant of Econ 101. They don’t realize that price ceilings actually decrease buyers’ access to goods whose prices are kept artificially low by government diktats.” ~Donald J. Boudreaux

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How Rich People Create Poverty

– February 29, 2024

“The real gains come from people moving to where their labor is more valuable  — and that’s in high-income countries like the United States. The problem is, we rich Westerners won’t let them come.” ~Art Carden

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Tariff Truths

– February 26, 2024

“President Biden has maintained his predecessor’s duties on some $370 million worth of Chinese imports. Both national conservatives and liberal protectionists are dead wrong about tariffs and growth.” ~Tarnell Brown

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Milton Friedman Was More Like F.A. Hayek Than He Likely Knew

– February 22, 2024

“While both men won the Nobel Prize in economics – Hayek in 1974 and Friedman in 1976 – economists regard the scholarly work of Hayek as differing almost categorically from that of Friedman.” ~Donald J. Boudreaux

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Coats, Pencils, and Division of Knowledge

– February 19, 2024

“‘Wonder’ is not too strong a word to describe a social process that allows us to get so much bread and so much clothing for so little sweat of our brows.” ~Art Carden

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Markets and the Montgomery Bus Boycott

– January 18, 2024

“The immutable laws of markets enabled Montgomery’s black community to use the withholding of bus fares through the organized boycott to effectively turn the city bus company into an ally for legal reform.” ~Blake Ball

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Review: Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative

– January 11, 2024

“Friedman wasn’t a contrarian, but a firm believer in following the facts wherever they led. This ‘positive economics’ approach would underpin his later contributions for which he was most known.” ~Michael N. Peterson

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The Cheap Populism of Bashing CEO Pay

– January 8, 2024

“The time needed to accumulate skills and experience is considerable and few people want to have the downsides of being a CEO. Demand for such skill is increasing faster than supply, which results in growing CEO pay. It’s basic economics.” ~Vincent Geloso

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Capitalism Is Impersonal, Not Soulless

– January 4, 2024

“Because in today’s global economy the people with whom we interact economically number literally in the billions, the percentage of these persons with whom we also interact personally is near zero.” ~Donald J. Boudreaux

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