Price Controls

Minimum Wage Hurts Whom It Claims to Help

If you care about the people struggling to keep their jobs in a difficult economy, you should oppose raising the minimum wage: it hurts the very people you want to help

Wage and Price Controls Are Not the Answer to Inflation

Reinforcing what economic theory tells us, evidence of the harm of price controls abounds in history, from the infamous 303 A.D. Edict of Emperor Diocletian in Ancient Rome to America’s 1970s gasoline price controls and, perhaps most infamously, New York City’s disastrous eight-decade-long experiment with rent control.

Price Controls Attack the Freedom of Speech

We increasingly live in a new “dark age” of economic ignorance, and even stupidity. Few things exemplify this trend as much as the call for price controls over the interactions of multitudes of people in the marketplace of supply and demand. There are few government...

Wages War

Many high employment “countries such as Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland” have no minimum wage laws.

Yield Purchasing Power: $100M Today Matches $100K in 1979

I wrote a story about poor Clarence who retired in 1979, and even poorer Larry who retired last year. I created these characters to challenge the notion of calculating a real interest rate by subtracting inflation. The idea is that the decline of a currency can be measured by the rate of price increases. This price-centric view leads to the concept of purchasing power—the amount of stuff that a dollar can buy. It’s the flip side of prices. When prices rise, purchasing power falls.

Are Hedge Funds Worth More Than Kindergartens?

"The top 25 hedge fund managers made more than all the kindergarten teachers in the country," declared President Obama in a discussion of poverty at Georgetown University. Calling them “society’s lottery winners,” he proposed to hike their taxes. Predictably, battle...

The Most Common Error in Economic Debates

Have you ever been in an argument about whether we should raise taxes and then someone tosses out a real whopper? “The top tax rate for decades after World War II was over 90% and look how the economy boomed!” Or perhaps you read a Paul Krugman column where he said...