Category Archives: Agriculture
New School Lunch Program Highlights the Coordination Problem
In trying to tackle the youth obesity problem in the country, Michelle Obama championed a change in the school lunch program, a program that places new restrictions on the calories from school lunches as well as mandates nutrition guidelines for school lunch programs. The new calorie guidelines are based on the average student at various [...]
Breaking windows, destroying cars and creating jobs
Bastiat, in one of his best-known essays points to the lack of logic of those who suggest that we can become better off through destruction, a fallacy that has come to be called the “broken window fallacy.”. In 2006, in this inaugural post on Bastiat’s Bastions, Norbert Michel and I suggested that the notion that [...]
Elinor Ostrom, 2009 Nobel Laureate in Economics, dead at 78
Yesterday, Professor Elinor Ostrom passed away as is reported in this article in the Washington Post. In 2009, she was awarded the Nobel prize in economics for her work on how people are able to manage the “tragedy of the commons,” the overuse of resources that are not protected by private property rights, without government [...]
Water, water, not quite everywhere
Last year, I posted “Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink,” borrowing the famous line from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. What I wrote about there was how residents of the southwestern Louisiana town of Sulphur had little incentive to economize on their use of water because they paid a flat fee for [...]
Driving and Drinking: What is Moving the Prices of Gasoline and Wine?
Unless you have been laid up in bed, you are sure to have noticed that the price for gasoline has skyrocketed in the last few days, rising by about $0.25 a gallon here in south Louisiana, or about 8%. For extra credit only to the first of my students to correctly post the right answer, [...]
The government budget constraint and problems of deficit spending
Economists recognize a limit on government spending due to the sources for the spending for those dollars to be spent. Economists call this limitation the “government budget constraint.” We recognize that there is a tax to be paid one way or the other, different ways of raising the funds implies different taxes. Some of these [...]
The case of the disappearing oysters
Oysters being overfished After having some delightful appetizers of char-broiled oysters at a local restaurant here in Thibodaux, I was especially disheartened when I saw this story about the plight of oyster production and habitat worldwide appeared on the influential Breitbart.com blog. It references an article that recently appeared in the biological science journal, BioScience. According [...]
Food prices may have been too much straw for the camels of Egypt and Tunisia
In this article from the U.K. newspaper, The Telegraph, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes about how increasing food prices and food scarcity, while not causing the tumult in Tunisia and Egypt, may have triggered recent riots and revolution in those countries, the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak. When prices for major necessities, such as [...]
Honesty from a politician, rare but still refreshing
In posts as early as July of 2007, I have bemoaned the misallocation of resources as a result of poorly conceived policies by politicians to help special interests line their pockets. For humorous effect, I have pointed out that the ethanol subsidy increases the use of corn as fuel instead of as food, and that [...]
Lob STER WARS
Lob STER WARS On a small island off of the coast of Maine, lobstermen are shooting at each other (Lobster wars rock remote Maine island, Clarke Canfield, Associated Press Writer). Much like urban gangbangers, they are fighting over profitable territory. And just like their urban counterparts, the territory under dispute is “un-ownable” or for the [...]