As we get into the primary and general election season it is clear that U. S. citizens are a particularly ungrateful lot. Voters are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. They are angry that the economy…
Category: Other
Minnesota’s farmers might be escaping the worst of pricing realities
When I saw the headline this week that crop conditions in the United States were good and those in Minnesota unprecedentedly favorable, my first reaction was sympathy for my friends and relatives who farm. ‘Well, that’s too bad,’ I thought.…
Target’s politics may sink to the bottom line
Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel and the controversy over the retailer’s corporate donations to a business group trying to elect GOP gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer may help move us back to an earlier era, one in which people considered beliefs and…
Digging ditches, pondering free trade
The young farmer who rents our pasture hasn’t studied economics, or he wouldn’t have offered to spell me doing hand-shoveling recently. His offer was generous on a sweltering day, but it ignored the vital economic principle of “comparative advantage.” That…
Economies can thrive under varying taxes, regulations
Be suspicious whenever you hear pundits proclaim that some change in taxes or regulation will cause either disaster or stupendous success in our economy. These factors of tax laws and varied government regulation of economic activity are important to how…
Recessions help weed out businesses not making it
Doctors used to call pneumonia ‘the old man’s friend’ because it afforded a quiet and relatively painless death to aged people already fated to die from a more unpleasant malady. Recessions perform the same function for businesses that have been…
Politicians weigh own opportunity costs in re: jobless benefits
The question of how unemployment benefits affect the unemployment rate is one where one must pay close attention to the magnitude of incentive effects as well as what direction they are. In this case, the direction is clear from economic…
8th-grade grads invented, Ph.D.s explained their inspirations
University of Minnesota economist Vernon Ruttan, who died in 2008, understood the economic factors that motivated his contemporaries, brothers Louis and Cyril Keller, two rural Minnesota blacksmiths, to invent the skid-steer loader a half-century ago. Louis Keller died this week…
Constitution short on government’s economic role
Historically, economists have paid little attention to national constitutions, leaving that to legal scholars. But questions about the constitutionally proper economic role of government arise frequently now, at least among the general populace, if not among economists. So the issue…
Revaluations cause increased demand
When the U.S. Postal Service announced that it is seeking to raise first-class postage to 46 cents, it placed itself in the same position China did when, a few weeks ago, it announced that it would let the value of…