Category archive: Economics
Breaking News: Destroy Your House and End up ‘better off than before’
By Chuck Roger • September 9th, 2011 12:00 am
By Chuck Rogér Café Hayek blogger Don Boudreaux recently posted a priceless open letter to University of Maryland professor Peter Morici. Dear Peter: In your guest blog-post yesterday at CNBC you argue that the destruction caused by hurricane Irene will spark a “process of economic renewal [that] can leave communities better off than before” (“Economic [...]
Manipulating Money Supply Is Like Lying about Cholesterol
By Chuck Roger • August 31st, 2011 12:00 am
Originally at American Thinker By Chuck Rogér Would you lend money to a friend if you thought that there was a good chance that you’d not get all of your money back? Good friends might make such loans in spite of the lousy prospects for repayment. But what about bankers? Should bankers lend to people [...]
Big Government’s Big Spending Has Boosted Inflation and Killed 3.5 Million Jobs
By Chuck Roger • August 12th, 2011 12:00 am
Originally at American Thinker By Chuck Rogér Rising prices are no surprise to anyone who has been following the actions of Ben Bernanke’s Fed. Two rounds of “quantitative easing” injected more than $2.3 trillion into bank reserves, and thus to some extent into the economy. The more money chasing products and services, the more those [...]
Progressives and Their Taxes Kill Cities
By Chuck Roger • August 1st, 2011 12:00 am
Originally at American Thinker By Chuck Rogér High taxes are bad for cities. Low taxes encourage growth. In fact, between 1980 and 2007, compared to the ten most-taxed metropolitan areas, America’s ten least-taxed metropolitan areas experienced three times faster population growth, 2.7 times faster employment growth, and twice as great an increase in personal income. [...]
The God Complex vs. I Don’t Really Know Anything
By Chuck Roger • July 26th, 2011 12:00 am
By Chuck Rogér No matter how complex the problem, you have an absolutely overwhelming belief that you are infallibly right in your solution. Imagine feeling this way about world poverty, the illegal drug trade, teen pregnancy, global warming, or the national debt. If you do subscribe to the “God Complex,” as characterized by The Undercover Economist author [...]
Dissecting progressive arrogance, Part IV
By Chuck Roger • July 12th, 2011 12:00 am
The Clear Thinking blog is on hiatus and will return with new posts on July 18, 2011. Meanwhile, please enjoy this re-post of the “Dissecting progressive arrogance” series. More “Dissecting Progressive Arrogance” I, II, III, V, VI, VII By Chuck Rogér Today we return to the well of progressive wisdom known as Clive Crook, Financial Times columnist. [...]
Bernanke’s Posturing Ignores Inflation Reality and Hurts Americans
By Chuck Roger • June 10th, 2011 12:00 am
Originally in American Thinker By Chuck Rogér In a recent article discussing the effects of “quantitative easing,” I remarked that the “Federal Reserve has laid the charges, connected the leads, and now stands ready at the detonator.” From the article: In QE, a nation’s central bank buys financial instruments, such as Treasury bonds, with money decreed into existence through [...]
Bernanke’s Economic Time Bomb
By Chuck Roger • May 26th, 2011 12:00 am
Originally in American Thinker, May 20, 2011 By Chuck Rogér Ben Bernanke’s Federal Reserve has laid the charges, connected the leads, and now stands ready at the detonator. America waits. We wait for the economic effects of “quantitative easing” (QE). In QE, a nation’s central bank buys financial instruments, such as Treasury bonds, with money decreed into existence through [...]
Charles Schumer: Vote-Chasing Purveyor of Economic Fallacy
By Chuck Roger • May 23rd, 2011 12:00 am
Updated from original in American Thinker, May 17, 2011 By Chuck Rogér Recently, Democrat Senator Charles Schumer told attendees at the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast and Conference that immigration reform would improve “wages and working conditions for all Americans,” thereby solving our short-term economic problems. The Senator said, All you need to know, and tell [...]
Trump’s ‘Fair Trade’ Rhetoric Hurts Republicans’ White House Chances
By Chuck Roger • April 28th, 2011 12:00 am
Originally in American Thinker, April 25, 2011 By Chuck Rogér After a recent phone conversation with Donald Trump, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer concluded that The Donald is “absolutely” serious about seeking the GOP Presidential nomination. That’s unfortunate. The illiberal media will have a field day with Mr. Trump’s flawed ideas on free trade. In January, [...]
Of Joseph Stiglitz, by Joseph Stiglitz, for Joseph Stiglitz
By Chuck Roger • April 19th, 2011 12:00 am
Originally titled “The Spreading of Economic Fallacy” in American Thinker, April 15, 2011 By Chuck Rogér The world of academia provides a comfy home to progressives. And when one of the critters writes in Vanity Fair magazine, gems of “thought” tend to emerge. In a new Vanity Fair article, “Of the 1%, by the 1%, [...]
Progressive Fallacy Number 667: Wealth Redistribution Creates Societal ‘Harmony’
By Chuck Roger • April 4th, 2011 12:00 am
Originally in American Thinker, March 30, 2011 By Chuck Rogér Is wealth envy a serious problem in a technologically advanced country like America? Economist Tyler Cowen observes that economic indignation is mostly felt toward: …the guy down the hall who got a bigger raise … [or toward] the husband of your wife’s sister, because the [...]
‘The poor are getting poorer’ is a baseless claim
By Chuck Roger • February 4th, 2011 12:30 am
In the United States, people who contend that the rich are growing richer at the expense of the poor don’t have reality on their side. To accept the claim, one must believe in a finite-sized pot of wealth from which everyone is supposed to be allocated a “fair share.” But a simple thought experiment reveals [...]
A business owner’s treatise on government heavy-handedness and union excess
By Chuck Roger • January 24th, 2011 12:30 am
Clear Thinking blog reader and business owner Don Ross recently received an email complaint from a customer. Don’s reply comprises a solid condemnation of Washington’s explosive invasion into our private lives. Don graciously granted me permission to post that reply following a summary of the customer’s concerns. The customer expressed disappointment at finding political commentary [...]
A thought experiment on the ‘income gap’
By Chuck Roger • January 18th, 2011 12:30 am
Wealthy people must be punished–presumably for accumulating all that nasty “wealth.” At least this is the impression one gets from today’s class warfare mongering progressives, who talk of the evils of the “income gap.” Free To Choose Network director Max Borders suggests the following approach to kicking off a discussion with an income gap worrier. Whenever [...]
Why worry over the ‘trade deficit’?
By Chuck Roger • January 11th, 2011 12:30 am
You hear it all the time. We’re getting killed by China! We need to stop shipping jobs overseas. Neither complaint holds water when viewed against global trade’s economic effects on America. Working off an inventory of topics which I’ve been collecting, I reach back to a September 2010 post by Cato Institute’s Daniel Griswold for an [...]
Obama’s shellacking sinks in; economic recovery gathers steam
By Chuck Roger • December 22nd, 2010 12:30 am
For 27 months, since September 2008, Americans and the world have lived in a state of trepidation or outright fear. The national and global economies sometimes teetered on collapse. Let’s all take a deep breath. It’s easy to become entranced with all the doomsaying by “experts.” If you insist, then by all means stop reading [...]
Extension of the Bush tax cuts is not a ‘stimulus’; producers need confidence to increase production
By Chuck Roger • December 16th, 2010 5:43 am
During a Fox News Channel discussion panel, columnist Charles Krauthammer claimed that extending the Bush tax cuts would provide a huge stimulus to the economy in 2011. My wife looked at me and said, “Wait a minute. Pause that,” referring to the DVR-recorded installment of Special Report with Bret Baier that we were watching. See, [...]
New America Foundation president pushes carbon tax and ‘green’ economic fallacies
By Chuck Roger • December 14th, 2010 5:50 am
Republicans seem poised to get the Bush tax cuts extended. This has contributed to a “dismal two weeks for [Obama's] economic policy,” says Ted Halstead in a Financial Times commentary. Halstead is founder and president of the New America Foundation. When you see “New America” in the name of an organization, you know that you’re [...]
Hans Rosling and the life-prolonging power of wealth and freedom
By Chuck Roger • December 7th, 2010 6:33 am
If you haven’t seen this yet, it’s worth four minutes and forty-eight seconds of your time. The following video is a stunning illustration of the power of wealth and freedom to do wonderful things–things such as prolonging life. Hans Rosling is a Professor of International Health at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. Rosling boasts [...]
Wind power economic fallacies hurt Americans
By Chuck Roger • November 18th, 2010 1:50 am
Proponents of “renewable” energy sources (invariably the same people who criticize nuclear power) often resort to an economic fallacy to push solar and wind power. The proponents point out that in raw dollars, nuclear power gets taxpayer subsidies far greater than “renewable” sources receive. Yes, nuclear power draws huge raw dollar subsidies because it accounts [...]
The positive power of ‘income inequality’
By Chuck Roger • November 17th, 2010 1:51 am
Income inequality is critical to everyone’s prosperity. Too much sameness would be a really bad thing. Why? Facts from U.S. Census Bureau’s 2009 database on household income distribution: There are more than 4X the number of earners per household in the top fifth compared to bottom fifth. More than 3X the percentage of married couples [...]
Anatomy of a trade war: Stop shooting me or I shall shoot myself
By Chuck Roger • November 10th, 2010 11:17 pm
Capitol Hill politicians of both animal types, jackasses and elephants, have a tendency to escalate America’s economic problems with their tinkering–as if we need that right now. Tinkering with free trade can start full-blown trade wars, and sometimes real wars, to “protect American jobs.” Tariffs, reprisal tariffs, and reprisal-to-reprisal tariffs, the whole destructive bit. With [...]
The ‘green’ technology fallacy
By Chuck Roger • October 29th, 2010 2:13 am
One day, you’re going to drive an all-natural car fueled by exhaling your planet-killing CO2 into an organic tube plumbed to the car’s magic power chamber–painted green of course. This will solve two problems at once. The evil global-warming-inducing CO2 will be magically annihilated and you won’t have to use infinitely more evil fossil fuel, [...]
Dissecting progressive arrogance, Part IV
By Chuck Roger • October 28th, 2010 2:15 am
More “Dissecting Progressive Arrogance” I, II, III, V, VI, VII Today we return to the well of progressive wisdom known as Clive Crook, Financial Times columnist. In my October 18th post, I analyzed part of an article in which Crook flaunted his inability to understand why voters would reject what Obama and the Democrats are doing to [...]
