Erasmus opens In Praise of Folly with a letter to Thomas More, author of Utopia. They became good friends when Erasmus stayed in England. He gave More this bit of praise:
“[S]uch is the excellence of your judgment that it was ever contrary to that of the people’s.”
Indeed.
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Posted in Books, Great Thinkers, Pith
Tagged desiderius erasmus, erasmus, erasmus quotes, in praise of folly, praise of folly, thomas more, utopia
A British man was arrested for singing the 1970s hit “Kung-Fu Fighting”. Simon Ledger and his band were performing the song at a bar on the Isle of Wight. An asian audience member found the song offensive. Rather than tell the band, or take his business to a different establishment, he went to the police, claiming racial abuse. Racism is a punishable crime in Britain.
Police found the singer and arrested him later that night, appropriately enough, at a Chinese restaurant.
Comments Off on Regulation of the Day 169: Singing “Kung-Fu Fighting”
Posted in Nanny State, Regulation of the Day
Tagged britain, kung-fu fighting, political correctness, racial abuse, racism, uk
I just wrapped up a half-hour radio interview on the Mac McDowell Show on 92.5 FM in San Antonio. I don’t know if they archive their shows or not, but the website is here.
Comments Off on On the Radio – The Cost of Regulation
Posted in Media Appearances, regulation
It’s funny because it’s true. Click on the picture to enlarge.
The Hill: “GOP bill would require birth certificates from presidential candidates”
Because otherwise voters might elect a President who was never even born.
Yeesh.
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Posted in Political Animals, The Partisan Mind
George Soros spoke about Hayek at a Cato forum today. I didn’t attend, but I did read this excerpt that Politico put up an hour or two before the event. Soros does a pretty good job of slaying a straw man. Hayek’s actual ideas, however, remain intact. As it turns out, the two have a lot in common.
Soros points to Hayek as a believer in perfect competition, and perfect knowledge. That is, buyers and sellers have perfect knowledge of market conditions, can buy and sell in unlimited quantities with zero transaction costs, etc.
Economists commonly assume perfect competition in their models for purposes of simplicity. Soros rightly points out that this is thoroughly unrealistic, and should not be taken too seriously.
The trouble is that Hayek spent almost his entire career pointing out that, just like Soros, he believes perfect competition is a fiction. In Individualism and Economic Order, he points out that if such conditions came true, the world would be static. Nothing would ever change.
Markets change and adapt every day because people are finding out new information and acting on it. If everyone already knew all relevant information, nobody could find out new information. They’d already have it. Perfect competition means a permanent, unchanging equilibrium.
The real world is anything but equilibrated. Therefore, perfect competition does not exist. Case closed.
Hayek’s most enduring contribution is the Knowledge Problem, which is the very opposite of perfect competition. For Hayek, the economy is so complex and so dynamic, that no one person can possibly understand it well enough to direct it.
Distant regulators, no matter how smart, can never have a good enough command of the facts on the ground to come up with a better outcome than the people actually buying and selling in the economy. Everyone has a tiny sliver of specialized knowledge that nobody else has, and they act on it.
The best policies are the ones that let people act freely. Shortages and surpluses are revealed faster. Resources flow more quickly to the people who need them the most. That’s why Hayek supported free markets. He never said they were perfect. He did say they worked better than top-down alternatives because of the Knowledge Problem.
Soros and Hayek completely agree in rejecting perfect competition as a useful guide to policy, and on the chronic instability of markets. Where they differ is that Hayek actually rejects perfect competition more strongly than Soros does.
Land Use and Transportation Policy Analyst Marc Scribner looks at China’s experience with high-speed rail, and finds that it may not be a very good deal for the United States. Costs are so high that revenues don’t even cover the interest on the $271 billion of debt that high-speed rail has incurred for China.
Comments Off on CEI Podcast for April 28, 2011: High-Speed Rail
Posted in CEI Podcast, Economics, Spending
Tagged china, high speed rail, hsr, marc scribner
Over the last five years, the DC Metro has spent $2.4 million on back pay… for work that was never performed.
Some may be surprised to find out that labor unions were involved.
Comments Off on There Is No More Fat to Trim from Government Budgets
Posted in Spending
Tagged back pay, dc metro, labor unions, unsuck dc metro
Spending, deficits, and taxes are getting all the attention from reformers in both parties. In today’s Investor’s Business Daily, Wayne Crews and I argue that regulation is not to be forgotten:
Regulations cost the average business $8,086 per employee per year. Small businesses are especially hard-hit. Firms with fewer than 20 employees pay $10,585 per employee per year for regulatory compliance, according to the Crains’ report. When hiring employees becomes more expensive, fewer get hired. No wonder unemployment is so persistent.
We also offer up some reform ideas:
One reform is to purge the books of obsolete and clearly harmful rules. There is no need for Washington to have rules still on the books for a Y2K crisis that never even materialized. Nor is there any need for it to regulate the size of holes in Swiss cheese, which it does in great detail.
President Obama should appoint an annual bipartisan commission to comb through the Code of Federal Regulations and recommend rules for elimination. Congress would then be required to vote up-or-down on the package without amendment.
Read the article here; for more intellectual ammunition, see the just-released 2011 edition of Wayne’s “Ten Thousand Commandments” study.
Comments Off on Substantive Reform Must Include Cutting Regulatory Burdens
Posted in Economics, Publications, regulation
Tagged ibd, investor's business daily, regulation, regulation without representation, regulatory reform, wayne crews
Inertia Wins! 