Technology and Public Goods

As a wise man once taught me in a public choice class, excludability depends on the state of technology. Example:1 the Pay & Sit park bench. Design student Fabian Brunsing has devised a fiendish device that makes pay toilets seem positively munificent: Dubbed “Pay & Sit: The Private Bench,” it consists of a bench covered with [...]

Reasonable Homunculi Can Disagree: The Impossibility of Welfare Economics

I’ve just uploaded a new working paper, which is a slightly edited version of a chapter from my thesis, to SSRN. Here’s the abstract: This paper draws on the “preference reversal” literature in psychology and behavioural economics to argue for the impossibility of welfare economics. The effect of normatively-irrelevant contextual factors shows that humans do [...]

Analytical Anarchism

I’ve been remiss in not plugging this excellent collection of writing on the positive analysis of anarchism created by Michael Wiebe. There’s a list of published papers and books, and some working papers (including one by Eric and I). Here’s how Michael introduces the site: The purpose of Analytical Anarchism is to create an open forum [...]

Behind the Moral Curtain

I’m slow in posting this video of Elise Parham presenting her monograph Behind the Moral Curtain: The Politics of a Charter of Rights. The paper and video are both well worth checking out. Astute viewers may even be able to spot the back of my head in the video. Elise’s argument is that bills of [...]

The Key Speech

John Key’s speech to parliament today hardly signalled the commitment to reform he has been talking up. Summaries of the speech here and here, with commentary with which I largely agree here. There’s unlikely to be much in the way of tax reform.  With only the possibility of a 2.5% increase in GST, probably some [...]

Alan Bollard Doesn’t Understand Economics

Alan Bollard repeats the common claim that the difference in economic performance between Australia and New Zealand is due to Australia’s abundance of natural resources: Speaking on TVNZ’s Q+A programme yesterday, Alan Bollard said Australia had been “blessed by God sprinkling minerals” and had handled its economy well. He said New Zealand would do better [...]

Fear the Boom and Bust

Hayek versus Keynes rap battle. Many hat tips; most recently Daniel Aguilar via email, which gave me the impetus to post. I hope Russ Roberts and the econstories crew will consider a rap video of Tullock explaining why government performs poorly. I imagine a hype-man (Charles Rowley?) yelling “Trapzoid, motherfuckers!” somewhere in the chorus.

See the Dollar Auction in Action

Here’s a video of a public choice teacher running an all-pay dollar auction, and describing its relevance to lobbying (hat tip: Max Borders). The teacher misquotes WOPR, but at least he got the reference in there. Crampton runs a twenty dollar auction, which is more interesting because people care about the outcome a little more. He clearly needs to [...]

Corporatism in Everything or: How to Have Government Work for You without Resorting to Bribery

BK Drinkwater has a couple of excellent posts on established businesses using the force of government to muscle out competitors ( I also like them because they both have my name in them, to paraphrase the man himself). Here’s another interesting example from the story of unlicensed contractor stings I blogged about at Fr33Agents the [...]

Having it Both Ways

From p. 396 of Andrew Sinclair, Prohibition: The Era of Excess: Yet the strangest situation of all had been rendered legal by a decision of the Supreme Court. The Court had ruled that the Bureau of Internal Revenue had the right to request income-tax returns from bootleggers. The Court saw no reason “why the fact that a business [...]