What's New...

So far, roughly 300 external links and roughly 600 pages total.  This is with very little transfer of the roughly 500 links from the old site.  I also have roughly 1000 bookmarked links to enter.  But I'm gradually getting the major index structure hammered out.

Here are the newest additions!

NEW 3/19/2013: Market Failure

Real world economies are rife with market failure. This means choosing between second-best options, such as imperfect markets, NGO's and government solutions. Ideology and economic theory cannot say which is best: you must resort to experimentation and history. [more...]

NEW 3/19/2013: Shrugging off Atlas [More...]

Brad DeLong identifies Nicholas Eberstadt's big lie on the second page of "A Nation of Takers: America’s Entitlement Epidemic". A scary "9.5 percent per annum for fifty straight years" is actually 1.2 percent. [more...]

NEW 3/18/2013: What Do Econ 101 Students Need To Remember Second Most From The Course? [More...]

Brad DeLong lists 7 assumptions necessary to "market efficiency", and describes the frequent failures of these assumptions. "A great government will have foresight and take care to structure political-economic institutions to make these seven arenas of myopia and market failure as small as possible." [more...]

NEW 3/16/2013: Arindrajit Dube's Testimony on the Minimum Wage to the U.S. Senate [More...]

Has a one page executive summary that notes the key points on inequality, employment, turnover and frictions, prices, poverty, and complementarity with EITC. [more...]

NEW 3/15/2013: The end of laissez-faire [More...]

John Maynard Keynes points out that laissez faire is based on false assumptions, and that there are many necessary social undertakings. [more...]

NEW 3/13/2013: There are Democrats who'd like answers on assassinations too [More...]

Sensible people are not distracted by drones. Digby says: It's about whether the president has the constitutional or statutory authority to carry out a covert assassination program against American citizens on the new "global battlefield." [more...]

NEW 3/11/2013: Keynsianism

Libertarians reflexively oppose Keynesian macroeconomic ideas because they give an important role to government, instead of relying on laissez-faire. The Great Depression and the Great Recession both illustrate the superiority of Keynsianism [more...]

NEW 3/11/2013: The American corporation and the centrally planned economies of the soviet empire [More...]

"My own prejudice is that today's corporations struggle mightily with the same challenges that brought down the planned economies of the Soviet era, and that they succeed more from their impressive ability to hold critical resources and to eliminate weaker competition, than through a unique gift for channeling and distributing resources." [more...]

NEW 3/11/2013: Central Planning

Libertarians associate central planning with their worst bugaboos: Communism, Socialism, and the State. But Corporations are notorious for their central planning: all of Walmart is run through central planning. When market failures are overwhelming (as in health care), history shows central planning is much more effective. [more...]

NEW 3/04/2013: Category Archives: new deal denialist truth squadding [More...]

Eric Rauchway's "The Edge Of THe American West" articles on New Deal denialism. [more...]

NEW 3/04/2013: Franklin Delano Obama? [More...]

"Now, there’s a whole intellectual industry, mainly operating out of right-wing think tanks, devoted to propagating the idea that F.D.R. actually made the Depression worse. So it’s important to know that most of what you hear along those lines is based on deliberate misrepresentation of the facts." [more...]

NEW 3/03/2013: With Tyler against the strawmen and conservatives. [More...]

Eric Rauchway points out Tyler Cowen's subtle insertion of unspoken claims about the New Deal. When did you stop beating your wife, Tyler? [more...]

NEW 3/03/2013: New Deal Denialism [More...]

Amity Shlaes (in The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression) and others attempt to discredit FDR's successful and popular polices for relief, recovery and reform by cherry-picking and misinterpreting data. [more...]

NEW 3/03/2013: The New Deal

Libertarians cannot explain the successes of FDR's New Deal. Hence, they engage in ridiculous denialism about how effective it was. [more...]

NEW 3/03/2013: Historical Revisionism

The facts of history do not support libertarianism. This spawns an industry supplying libertarians with false history that supports their beliefs. [more...]

NEW 3/03/2013: The Artistic Superstructure of the Epoch of Labor Unionism and Socialization: Ludwig von Mises on the Detective Story [More...]

Ludwig von Mises comically sees detective fiction as an essentially leftist literary genre crafted to undermine capitalism. [more...]

Dependents of the State [More...]

"We are all dependents of the state, not just the poor, and it’s certainly not the poor who benefit most from their dependence. [...] Just about every aspect of America’s economic and legal infrastructure [...] allows the rich to stay rich and get richer." [more...]

State Support Of The Wealthy

Supposed "makers" benefit much more from the state than the remainder of the populace. This is especially clear from historical and international comparisons. [more...]

Cognitive Democracy

"[...] democracy has unique benefits as a form of collective problem solving in that it potentially allows people with highly diverse perspectives to come together in order collectively to solve problems. Democracy can do this better than either markets and hierarchies, because it brings these diverse perceptions into direct contact with each other, allowing forms of learning that are unlikely either through the price mechanism of markets or the hierarchical arrangements of bureaucracy. Furthermore, democracy can, by experimenting, take advantage of novel forms of collective cognition that are facilitated by new media." [more...]

Pareto at Melos [More...]

The first fundamental theorem of welfare economics relies on false premises, and thus doesn't say anything about the virtues of actually-existing markets. But worse, the same optimality claims can be made on behalf of the most morally objectionable way of allocating resources, naked coercion. [more...]

It Ain't the State [More...]

Gene Callahan points out that rates of killing are much higher in stateless societies. Excellent discussion in comments. [more...]

MarketThink

MarketThink is a term coined by Tom Slee for the ideology of markets as ideal solutions for all problems. The first corollary is that problems markets cannot solve are ignored, dismissed, or considered unimportant. The second corollary is that government and other social choice opposes the benefits of markets. [more...]

Public Goods

Libertarians often refuse to recognize public goods or that governments have a role in public good provision. The list of important goods with substantial public goods components is very long, and includes education, law, safety, health, transportation, research and much more. [more...]

Varieties of Error [More...]

Paul Krugman points out that Austrian models incorrectly predicted hyperinflation, but that Austrian economists have not shown any evidence of admitting their errors or rethinking their models. [more...]

No One Makes You Shop At Wall Mart: The Surprising Deceptions Of Individual Choice

Tom Slee's easy to read game-theoretic description of how MarketThink, the dogma of individual choice, does not lead to optimal outcomes. [more...]

Confessions of an ex-libertarian [More...]

When Koen Deconinck's extended study of Austrian Economics found it was unconvincing, doubts about the rest of libertarianism rapidly followed. [more...]

Testimonials By Former Libertarians And Objectivists

Let's see what we can learn from some of the many who have left libertarianism. [more...]

Tax Flight Is a Myth: Higher State Taxes Bring More Revenue, Not More Migration [More...]

Raising taxes does not drive out the wealthy, despite well-publicized celebrity stories and frequent threats from wealthy businessmen. [more...]

Early Childhood: the Nub of the Problem [More...]

David Warsh directs us to James Heckman for the best research on the importance and cost effectiveness of early childhood interventions through quality pre-K programs. Despite decades of libertarian criticism, some of these programs have been shown to have high benefit-cost ratios and rates of return. Read all 15 points. [more...]

Soaring Systems: High Flyers All Have Equitable Funding, Shared Curriculum, and Quality Teaching [More...]

Developed nations around the world fund education centrally and equally. [more...]

Why Does the Minimum Wage Have No Discernible Effect on Employment? [More...]

"The employment effect of the minimum wage is one of the most studied topics in all of economics. [...] The weight of that evidence points to little or no employment response to modest increases in the minimum wage." [more...]

Study Confirms Tea Party Was Created by Big Tobacco and Billionaires [More...]

"A new academic study confirms that front groups with longstanding ties to the tobacco industry and the billionaire Koch brothers planned the formation of the Tea Party movement more than a decade before it exploded onto the U.S. political scene." [more...]

The Tea Party

The Koch brothers' successor to the Libertarian Party: an attempt to usurp the Republican Party with fake grassroots. [more...]

The Big Speech Of The Week [More...]

Charlie Pierce discusses presidential strategy in pre-empting Republican plans to undermine changes. [more...]