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In my last post on meat markets and securities markets, I argued that competitive markets require government oversight to prevent fraud and monopoly. The post drew a response from Libertarian friends: didn’t I know that government regulators would immediately be captured by the regulated industry, resulting in worse fraud and monopoly? Industry . . . → Read More: Can Killing Government Prevent Special Interest Capture? Remy Welling, an IRS tax auditor, had a problem. In December 2002, her boss asked her to sign off on an audit that hadn’t yet begun, essentially giving a company an advance free pass. She refused, and began investigating. Pretty soon, she discovered what the company was up to: changing the issue . . . → Read More: Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With the Bill) by David Cay Johnston After Robert Mugabe drove her and other white Zimbabweans from their farms, Cathy Buckle refused to leave the country of her birth. She writes a weekly column documenting the disintegration of Zimbabwe: the mass starvation in the original breadbasket of Africa; the arbitrary arrests and killings; the collapse of public services; and . . . → Read More: Death and Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe On January 10, the House voted overwhelmingly to raise the federal minimum wage from $5.15 an hour to $7.25, the increase to be phased in over the next two years. The Senate has yet to vote on the issue. On January 12, the New York Times published a story by David Cay Johnston that . . . → Read More: The Minimum Wage and the IRS As Kevin Phillips recorded in Wealth and Democracy (2002), war has created the opportunity for many great fortunes. Thus the frenzied looting–and disregard for the lives of both US soldiers and corporate employees–displayed in Robert Greenwald’s new film Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers. One small example: drivers shuttle empty mail trucks . . . → Read More: Benefits of Military Spending “Who got the most standby [credit]s from the IMF over the last half century? The answer is Haiti, with twenty-two. And not just Haiti, but the Duvalier family (Papa Doc and Baby Doc), under whom Haiti got twenty of the twenty-two standbys from 1957 to 1986.” “The politics were bad, but the Duvaliers made . . . → Read More: The White Man’s Burden, by William Easterly “Just as opening the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes produced both great economic benefits (the North American Midwest could export grains, iron ore, machinery to the world on ocean-going ships) and some undesirable side effects as well (the introduction into the lake system of lamprey eels and zebra mussels), . . . → Read More: Gangsta-nomics at Harvard |
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