Category Archives: Political Economy
A St. Patrick’s Day Farewell to Intrade
This past November, 26th, I posted the following short piece to this blog. For several years, I and others have pointed to Intrade.com as a premier forecasting tool, a betting market or prediction market. Take a look at this blog’s archives in the category “Prediction Markets.” Intrade has been far more accurate at predicting elections [...]
New fees for athletics: Will they pass?
This week’s Nicholl’s Worth page one headline reads “Will it pass?” Pauling Wilson’s article having that headline concerns a referendum before students on raising student fees by $84 per semester for a full-time student to support Nicholls athletics. Here, I do not address the normative question, ”should students pass the referendum?” but rather the more [...]
Cigarette taxes revenues and elasticity of demand
A few weeks ago the Nicholls Worth ran this article about Jindal’s plan to change the structure of taxation in Louisiana, moving away from income taxes and toward sales taxes. More recently, more details of the governor’s tax proposals have been released, as we see in this article from the Baton Rouge Advocate. In particular, [...]
Obama’s own former adviser gives thumbs down on pushing up the minimum wage
Here is a thoughtful critique of the President’s minimum wage proposal, and this is from his former Chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer that appeared in the New York Times on 3-2-13. Of course, a few days ago, I posted this piece on the minimum wage here on Bastiat’s Bastions. So, [...]
Anakin Greenspan’s turn to the Dark Side
Before Alan Greenspan’s almost 19-year reign as Federal Reserve Chairman (economic sith?), and before his appointment by Nixon as Chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors, Greenspan was a private sector economic consultant and a critic of fiat money or a government manipulated monetary system. In fact, he penned ”Gold and Economic Freedom” (a short [...]
Romer, new theory of economic growth theory, and patent wars
One contender for this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics is Stanford economist Paul Romer, son of a Colorado governor. You should note that Romer is the developer of “Aplia,” a homework, quizzing, and practice software system that he sold a few years ago to Cengage. Aplia is the homework and quizzing software that is currently [...]
Maintaining the ability to price discriminate by changing property rights
Once you buy something, is it really yours? If it were yours, wouldn’t you be able to resell it if you wanted to? These are questions at the heart of a new case before the U.S. Supreme Court that you can read about here. The case involves something that many college students should be able [...]
Governor calls with last minute reprieve for California drivers
Just as many California drivers thought they were being sent to their doom with prices nearing $6 a gallon at some stations, California’s Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown has called on California’s air quality regulators to allow an early switch to the less strict winter blend of gasoline, a blend that produces smog more easily than the [...]
The rich leaving France in the face of a huge tax hike–who would have seen this coming?
If you take a look at this recent article from France24.com, you will see that many French businessmen are puting their houses on the market to leave France, trying to avoid being hit with a stinging 75% marginal tax rate (the rate on their highest earnings, their “marginal” earnings). Leaving a high tax region was [...]
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 [...]