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Economy, Taxes and Free Markets
85 posts, newest first (page 2 of 4).
Big companies love the regulations their small rivals cannot affordLarge firms often back new rules because compliance costs work as a moat against competitors, so more regulation can mean less competition. The regulation bill a ten-person company pays that a giant can shrug offA rule costs the same paperwork at ten workers or ten thousand, so it weighs most on small firms. The SBA studies, the 1980 law and the per-employee arithmetic. The 2008 housing crash began with Washington's push for easy mortgagesWall Street bet badly, but federal policy set the table. The CRA, the GSE housing goals, cheap money and the 2008 conservatorship, with every cause weighed. Houston has almost no zoning, and its houses cost less to prove itHouston is the biggest American city without conventional zoning, and it builds. How it works, three votes against zoning, and the flooding objection answered. Rent control's record from Stockholm to San Francisco is the same storyEconomists of every stripe say rent control shrinks housing supply. Stockholm, New York, San Francisco and St. Paul show how, with the arithmetic. The universal basic income idea keeps returning, and the evidence on workA guaranteed income sounds humane and simple. The big American experiments, Finland's trial and the arithmetic say otherwise, and so does the dignity of work. California's AB5 put freelancers out of work, and voters pushed backCalifornia reclassified millions of independent workers as employees in 2019, then spent two years issuing exemptions. The story of AB5 and Proposition 22. PATCO 1981, the strike that ended with 11,000 controllers firedReagan gave striking air traffic controllers 48 hours, then fired those who stayed out. The law behind it, the facts, and what it taught public unions. Should conservatives make peace with private-sector unions? Two viewsA newer right says unions can anchor families and towns; the older right says they protect insiders. Both cases, fairly stated, and a verdict. Davis-Bacon at ninety, the 1931 wage law that raises the price of a bridgeThe Davis-Bacon Act sets federal construction wages by survey, often at union scale, and its 1931 debate had a racial edge. What it costs and what it protects. Public-sector unions, and why FDR doubted they could bargain at allFranklin Roosevelt said bargaining could not be transplanted into government. Here is why he was right, and how the country drifted away from him. Seattle raised its minimum wage, and a city-funded study counted the hoursThe researchers Seattle paid to study its $15 wage found that cuts in hours outweighed the raise for low-wage workers. Here is the arithmetic and the fight. The minimum wage's 1938 birth and the workers it was meant to shut outSome early advocates openly wanted a wage floor to price the least productive out of work, and the 1938 law carried its cost to the same groups. Six myths about robber barons, sweatshops and the age of capitalismThe textbook Gilded Age leaves out that the so-called robber barons often got rich by cutting prices. Six popular claims, tested against the record. ESG investing with your pension money bends the fiduciary duty owed youA retirement manager owes you loyalty to your financial interest alone. Investing your savings to advance social goals breaks the duty ERISA set in 1974. Milton Friedman's 1970 essay against stakeholder capitalism still winsA corporate executive who spends shareholders' money on causes is levying a tax no one voted for. Friedman's 1970 case holds up against the 2019 rebuttal. Creative destruction, why the buggy whip makers lost and America wonGrowth always destroys old jobs and firms, and shielding incumbents makes everyone poorer. Schumpeter's insight explains how a country gets richer. Profit is a signal, not a sin, and what a loss tells a companyProfit and loss are the economy's feedback system, telling firms what customers value and what wastes resources. Government programs lack that signal. Japan's debt is far larger than ours, so why has it not collapsed yetJapan owes more than twice its yearly output and no crisis has come. The honest reason is a set of conditions America does not share. Two Germanys and two Koreas, the natural experiments that socialism lostHistory split two peoples in half and gave one side markets and the other a plan. The results are the closest thing economics has to a controlled experiment. Xiaogang village signed a secret contract in 1978 and China began to growEighteen farmers risked prison to keep what they grew, and the Chinese boom that followed is the best evidence for markets that central planners ever supplied. Eight socialism myths tested against the countries that actually tried itEight favourite claims of socialism's defenders, tested against the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Venezuela, Britain and the Germanys, each with a verdict. Denmark is not socialist, and its own prime minister said so at HarvardThe Nordic countries run market economies with free trade and heavy taxes on the middle class. The Nordic-model argument at its strongest, and the answer. Plymouth tried common property in 1621 and nearly starved before 1623The Pilgrims began with a common store. Governor Bradford's own history says that giving each family its own land in 1623 ended the hunger. A close reading.
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