In elementary economic theory, competitive market pressures force people selling nearly identical products to offer them at about the same price. If one seller tries to raise price unduly, buyers will spurn his product and buy cheaper elsewhere. In real…
Category: Other
City’s red tape ties up blighted homes
My wife and I face the same basic issue as the city of St. Paul. Fix it up or tear it down? For us, it is the unsatisfactory back porch on our 109-year-old house. For the city it is the…
GOP late to the party in condemning deficit spending
Republicans opposed to the Obama administration’s fiscal stimulus bill fretted noisily about ‘spending money we don’t have’ and ‘passing a burden on to our grandchildren.’ Their concern for fiscal prudence is laudable, but not credible, given the past 60 years.…
Greenspan’s poor excuses are laughable
Alan Greenspan should emulate Donald Rumsfeld. When you err badly as a policy maker and do enormous harm to the nation, hunker down and keep your mouth shut rather than demean yourself with lame excuses. That is what Greenspan does…
Stimulus tweaks: We’re laughing to keep from crying
For those who have followed congressional debate on the fiscal stimulus plan, it has helped to have a strong sense of irony. Without it, the gap between the overreaching rhetoric from both sides of the aisle and the true, foreseeable…
A strategic dilemma for organic farmers
As worried families rein in spending as the recession deepens, a growing fraction of Minnesota farmers have their own economic worry: What is the ‘income elasticity of demand’ for organic foods? Both production and consumption of organic products has grown…
View of market losses affects saving, spending
People’s responses to the stock market collapse — and their decisions about whether to save or spend — are much affected by their perceptions of their own wealth. Like most people, I have seen the value of some of my…
Stimulus needed, however it’s spent
The current debate about the Obama administration’s $850 billion fiscal stimulus plan propagates such misconceptions that I feel compelled to put aside my general skepticism about how well such Keynesian policies work in the real world and explain—and even defend—this…
Murky property rights led to Newport levee mess
Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we fail to clearly define property rights. That doesn’t rhyme, but it expresses how University of Chicago economist and 1991 Nobel laureate Ronald Coase, known for his work on property rights,…
China, U.S. need to change bad habits
For the United States to prosper over the long run, we need to reduce the share of total output that households consume. We need to increase the proportion of income that households and governments save. We need to increase investment…