Disqus - Latest Comments for Alan Gunn

Re: Bundles of Oy

Alan Gunn — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 12:08:15 -0000

I wish we could get this message across to teenage girls, who all too often think that having a baby will create someone to love them. I know kids whose mother realized, at the age of 21, that being single and having four kids was a drag, so she basically gave them to child protective services.

I think my own kid (now 25) is terrific. But I can still remember every parent's happiest moment--when the kid falls asleep.

Re: Today in Backwardsville

Alan Gunn — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 17:05:07 -0000

Even if the minimum wage didn't have the bad effects that it actually has, what justification could there possibly be for imposing the cost of a forced transfer to (some) low-wage workers on those who employ low-wage workers?The earned income tax credit increases the wages of the working poor and pays for it out or tax revenues generally. One would think that leftists would prefer that source of financing, which takes from people more or less according to their ability to pay, to taking the money from the very people who provide what jobs the unskilled can get. Are laundry owners really a more-attractive target than doctors and lawyers?

Re: No Limits to Growth

Alan Gunn — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:29:48 -0000

Nothing's wrong with it except for Congress. Your model doesn't show huge amounts of corn being grown to make ethanol. And so on. Models that attempt to make predictions but which don't incorporate public-choice theory are incomplete.

Re: Dworkin on Taxes and Legitimacy

Alan Gunn — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 12:32:46 -0000

All of Dworkin's work reaches the same conclusion: Fundamental principles of morality require whatever the Democrats are currently asking for. This is a very popular line in academic circles, and Dworkin has done well there.

Re: Politics in the Era of Marketing

Alan Gunn — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:32:43 -0000

There was a time when many Democrats did try to help the poor. They weren't good at it, though, and it has been decades since they've even talked about it much. Now it's "the middle class," which, if it's lucky, wont have as much done to it as the poor did in the 60s.

Re: On Going Galt

Alan Gunn — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 18:06:07 -0000

Clinton-era tax rates aren't going to pay for the spending spree we've been on for the past month and a half, and certainly not for the coming rounds of bailouts, "free" medicine, and the like. I know the President talks about restoring the old rates, but he also said he was going to reduce government spending.

Re: The Trouble with Public Choice: Too Generous to Politicians

Alan Gunn — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 19:19:50 -0000

I don't see public choice as saying things about what goes on in people's heads. It's more of an evolutionary thing: those who don't behave in certain ways don't get and keep office. If you aren't the sort of person who will do the kinds of things politicians do, you won't be a successful politician (especially in an age when success in politics takes big bucks). This isn't really different from ordinary economics. Nobody thinks businessmen know what the marginal costs of their products are and try to set the price there; it's more a matter of if you don't come up with that price, one way or another, you'll lose the race and be gone. Even birds (looking for food) are "rational" in the economists' sense; nobody thinks they're smart, though (hence "birdbrain" as a term of opprobrium).

Re: Summer Reading

Alan Gunn — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 04:23:22 -0000

Ditto M. Hodak. This book is a decent short article, followed by repetitive nonsense. "The Black Swan" is just the same thing but less disciplined (hard to imagine, but true).

Re: Skepticism about prices

Alan Gunn — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:08:30 -0000

Hazlitt's "Economics in one Lesson" nails it, I think, by starting with the two mistakes people make in thinking about social problems: they don't consider the effects on people other than the immediate parties to the deal, and they don't think about long-run effects. Probably because it's hard.

Re: World War II Cured the Great Depression? Unlikely

Alan Gunn — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 16:52:48 -0000

Can't vouch for this personally, but I've heard that FDR started letting up some on industry when he realized he'd need them to make planes and tanks, and that the unions lost some of their clout when wage-price controls made it harder to squeeze concessions out of employers and patriotism made striking look bad. At the very least, we didn't have a lot of the earlier attempts at government-induced cartelization that marked the early New Deal years.