Ok, so my title is goofy sloganeering, but it isn’t any goofier than the common slogan it is based upon. Although the US could certainly save lives by copying some of the gun restrictions that all other industrialized nations use,…
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Concentrated roadway power
Money is power and as Mancur Olson first explained in The Logic of Collective Action, not all money is created equal. Mancur was an economist with an uber-macho-sounding first name. It is pronounced ‘Man-Sir’ which sounds like the kind of…
Posted in Public Finance
A public conspiracy to protect pharmaceutical profits at taxpayer expense
Every so often I get requests to sign a petition supporting various business interests. The petitions are promoted by fly-by-night “organizations” that are fronts for lobbyists like EconomistLetter.com. Lately I’ve been getting emails from ConcernedEconomists.org that are worried about the pharmaceutical industry’s…
Posted in Health, Public Finance
VOX messed up: Amazon.com already has enormous monopoly power
Emily Stewart at Vox.com made a mistake about monopoly power in America. She wrote that Amazon… could eventually become so big that it can control what shipping companies such as FedEx and UPS charge it, and, in areas where it becomes…
Posted in Managerial Micro, Public Finance
Monopolistic competition in health care
According to Modern Healthcare magazine, medical ambulances charged between $26,000 and over a half million dollars for each individual flight in North Dakota over the past four years. The prices averaged around $60,000 which is extremely steep given that almost…
Posted in Health, Public Finance
Criminalizing drugs makes about as much sense as criminalizing depression.
Which has a greater cost to society, depression or addiction? The estimated burden on America is similar. The White House reported in 2014: The economic cost of drug abuse in the US was estimated at $193 billion in 2007, the…
Posted in Health, Public Finance
Democratic corporate governance
Are corporations authoritarian or democratic? Corporations tend to be hierarchical institutions in which workers often feel like they are working within a communist dictatorship, but compared with privately-held companies, corporations are extremely democratic. A privately-held company can be owned by…
