Whither the Middle Class?

This rather dystopic picture of the future by Douglas Copeland made an interesting point about the reality of widespread, structural unemployment.  (And this is particularly apparent in Florida, which was heavily over-invested in all manner of real estate related gigs, and is now filled with formerly successful real estate agents, mortgage brokers, construction managers, etc.): [...]

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Web Round Up

Sorry kids, it’s been a busy week (out in the non-blogging world), but I found a few interesting things to share. Lying Eyes had a nice piece on the limits of markets. Jonah Goldberg notes that the taboos on criticizing Obama (and his manifest arrogance) are becoming the stuff of ordinary observation.  This breaking of [...]

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Castles Made of Sand

Probably the scariest revelation I’ve had in recent years is coming to undesrtand how little the experts at the top know what they’re doing, even as greater and greater trust is placed in them.  As I’ve gotten older, friends have become CEOs, high level government officials, partners in law firms, and the like.  While most are [...]

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Bailouts: The Anti-Capitalist Virus

I wrote this in March and it’s more true than ever: Bailouts are bad for many reasons. But the two worst are that they cost a ton of money, and, second, they get government in bed with business. As a result, we’re becoming increasingly numb as a people to the idea that a $1T here [...]

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Banking and Free Markets

Banking by corporations and limited liability companies is not essential to free markets. Like bankruptcy, all of these arrangements involve shifting some of the harm caused by risk-takers onto those who did not take the risks. There may be good reasons to socialize (i.e,. disperse) risk. People may be improvident or need some paternalistic guidance. [...]

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Obama: Helping the Yeoman Billionaires

If we’re going to be spending tons of money on helping banks and dying, mismanaged companies, would it be too much to ask that the redistribution does not go from the productive 25% or so of this country to the risk-preferring .0001% on Wall Street, but that these huge sums actually goes to homeowners in [...]

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Gaming the Geithner Plan

There are probably a million ways to game the Geithner bailout plan, just as the TARP has already led to various unintended consequences, such as the continued provision of generous bonuses by AIG and the Merrill Lynch purchase by BofA. James Galbraith has a good article on this today. The whole premise of the bailout [...]

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Rallying the Rich Won’t Save Conservatism

One sad thing about the CPAC Conference is that while the various speakers’ criticism of Obama’s “soak the rich” policies are true and persuasive, conservative leaders are missing out on an important recent development that renders much of the old strategy focused on growth, low taxes, and a rousing defense of capitalism less relevant than [...]

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Economic History and Obamanomics

The absolute craziest convention on Wall Street, at the Federal Reserve, and among academic economists is simply to ignore economic history before the Great Depression. It’s particularly wacky to do so as the Federal Reserve, which was billed as a means of avoiding economic dislocation after the Panic of 1907, was established in 1913. In [...]

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