The Tax Foundation is a mutilitarian organization that tries to get Americans to vote for lower income taxes by promoting “Tax Freedom Day” every year. But they are misleading because income taxes are progressive. The median American does not work…
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Don’t Let The BETTER Be The Enemy Of The GOOD, Especially If You Don’t Know Anything Better
I got an email yesterday from Nobel Laureate, Vernon Smith, on behalf of an organization called EconomistLetter.com. They want me to join 150 other economists in signing a letter to stop the proposed minimum wage hike. EconomistLetter.com points out that…
Posted in Medianism, Public Finance
When is equity efficient? Usually.
Updated January 15, 2024 Economics textbooks have been overly obsessed with the idea that greater equity (fairness) usually leads to less efficiency (production of goods and services). Economists typically measure equity as equality of monetary wealth because the typical economist…
It is an equity-efficiency CURVE, not a tradeoff
Economists are obsessed with efficiency which means* the maximum production of goods and services as measured at market prices. Maximizing GDP is the most common form of efficiency worship. The most popular economics textbook, by Greg Mankiw begins by laying…
Stop Pretending Anybody Wants Exactly Equal Wealth
Millions of people have seen a great 6-minute video that explains research about inequality by Michael Norton of Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke [pdf]. Unfortunately, the video propagates a common misleading trope by claiming that a perfectly…
Posted in Inequality, Public Finance
Obamacare vs. Medicare
A lot of Americans dislike the Affordable Care Act (ACA or Obamacare) because they say it expands government too much and will increase taxes. As Milton Friedman accurately said, for the government, to spend is to tax. So how big is…
Freedoms = Rights — Machine Gun Edition
Updated 2023/01/03 As Isaiah Berlin said, freedom for wolves is death to the lambs. Everyone likes more freedom, but all the freedoms that people debate about are contentious because increasing one person’s freedoms reduces the freedoms of others. In theory…
Medianism 