Whether it’s Black Market or Legal, Weed is a Serious Cash Crop From the legal markets thriving in states like Colorado and Washington, to the underground trade that generates billions of Mexican cartels, the economics of weed are crazy. Ganja. Smoke. Dro. Chronic. Spliffage. The names are as varied as the opinions about it: from…
Regulatory Capture is a process by which regulatory agencies become dominated and directed by the corporations or special interests they are supposed to be regulating. It’s like putting the mafia in charge of writing regulations for bookmaking. Most generally associated with Nobel laureate George Stigler and postulated as an actual theory in the early 1970’s,…
One of the first principles that any student of economics learns – or should learn – is that when you subsidize something, you get more of it. While they often fall short on understanding other principles of economics, liberals sort of understand this one. They reasoned, “If you get more of something when you subsidize…
Most people try to avoid being criminals. I believe that even in the darkest depths of any bureaucracy, there are good people who really desire to be “public servants.” This belief can be difficult to maintain when abuses and abusers are exposed but it is important that we realize that things left ignored become habits…
When any of us suffers an injury or serious illness we require medical care, so it must be a right that we receive it. Right? When a large number of people begin to insist that something is a right, we can be sure that the politicians will begin crafting the legislation to declare it so,…
At the beginning of the Cold War, George Kennan introduced the idea of “containing” an unfriendly state as part of his work on U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union. Later the idea of containment was implemented in part through the use of economic sanctions. It was based on two assumptions: For both ideological and geopolitical…
“Khufu2” by _Khufu.JPG: byderivative work: Gospodar svemira (talk) – _Khufu.JPG. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. 1. Pharaoh Khufu of Egypt Khufu was a Pharaoh of Ancient Egypt’s Old Kingdom. He reigned from around 2589 to 2566 BC. Khufu was the second pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty. He is generally accepted as being the…
Lobbyist are often decried as the reason for most of what is wrong with our country, government, and society as a whole. They are those lowdown scoundrels of big moneyed influence and corporate cronyism who buy congressmen as easily as one orders Chinese takeout, and who have sinister influence on all matters of policy. The…
We hear about it all the time. After a natural disaster, or during times of civil unrest such that transpired recently in Ferguson, businesses price gouge items in high demand. Water or a ride away from a dangerous area become expensive commodities. The instinct is to chastise such actions as immoral and selfish. But a…
The main problem with welfare such as unemployment benefits, or government handouts, is that it de-capitalizes the productive members of society and capitalizes unproductive members. The productive members are the entrepreneurs. Those who predict what goods consumers will demand in the future and produce them in the present. When the government imposes taxes, it takes…
No. I do not hate “poor people”. I’ve been one. It was not much fun. Ramen noodles and stolen cable is no way to live. I am not a huge fan of being poor but I do not hate poor people. That being said, I do despise the minimum wage. Here are ten reasons why:…
In an era when girls outperform boys at school and outnumber male students at universities, and when women experience no more practical hindrances than men in achieving anything they want in life, it has become harder to paint women as victims. Feminists have been forced to shift their attention to the hazy cultural sphere in…