Category Archives: Crime
Baptists and Bootleggers, Damon and the UAE
Matt Damon has proven over and over to be a talented actor and screenwriter. In December, he will be coming out with a pro-environmental movie about fracking to extract natural gas and petroleum from certain rock structures, a movie titled Promised Land. No doubt, Matt Damon is an environmentalist–he believes in this new project. A [...]
Drug laws, prohibition and rent seeking
One of my facebook friends, Will Harvard, a very bright recent graduate of Columbus State University, in Georgia, just posted as his status this quote from a web pamphlet, Speaking out against drug legalization (p. 9) on the DEA’s website at: http://www.justice.gov/dea/demand/speak_out_101210.pdf One favorite argument of those who claim prohibition didn’t work point to the [...]
Gasoline Shortages in Egypt
Last January, I wrote in this post about how Mubarak’s hold on Egypt was lost, in part, due to food riots, riots over the rising prices of food. The problem was that the government in Egypt, to placate its citizens, had created programs to keep food prices down, at least to some, creating “program addiction,” a [...]
Racism and the War on Drugs
While a bit late for celebrating Martin Luther King’s Birthday, though it is still Monday by my clock, here is a short article by my graduate school mate, Randy Holcombe, of Florida State. During the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan, some thoughtful observers noted that African Americans paid a disproportionate price in [...]
The cost of excess baggage
I just returned from participating in the Southern Economic Association’s annual conference in Washington, DC. It was the first time I have flown since the airlines started charging extra fees for checked baggage. As a result of those baggage fees, I fought to smash my bag into the overhead bin and ended up swapping shoes with [...]
More on political donors and special favors
Well, just like the line of Cain’s accusers, these stories of special favors for political donors seem to have no end. In this story, it seems that the White House has once again given out about a half billion dollars of taxpayer money to a political donor to provide a product that we can get [...]
Waste and corruption in competing for special favors in renewable energy
This New York Times article describes the federal government’s huge subsidy program in renewable energy as a gold rush. Perhaps, a better analogy is a land rush, like the competition to get land when the Oklahoma territory was opened up. There, something was being given away, and there really wasn’t anything new being created, as that land in Oklahoma [...]
Is Social Security a Ponzi Scheme?
In 2008, Bernie Madoff became famous when he was charged with investment fraud, operating a Ponzi Scheme, a scheme the SEC defines as an investment fraud that involves the payment of purported returns to existing investors from funds contributed by new investors. Ponzi scheme organizers often solicit new investors by promising to invest funds in [...]
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 [...]
What was that again? Update on “Drugs, Money and American Hypocrisy”
What was that again, about our hypocrisy? Recently (10/8/10), I posted an article “Drugs, Money and American Hypocrisy.” Here are a few updates, some news articles about the currency dispute with China and what we in the US are doing about our own currency. First is this article from Reuters on how some Federal Reserve officials are advocating inflation [...]