Not Everyone Should Own a Home. Amen. What the Australians, the Europeans, and those who actually have to make their living in banking all get is that many, many people lack the means and others the responsibility to own their own homes. What was lacking in the run-up to the current bubble was not regulation. [...]

As a math major, law school grad, and economic policy wonk, I’m not sure which aspect of this stupidity by the New York Times horrifies me most. Is it: that people think we do tax at those rates, that some people think we should, that no editor caught the logical flaws before publication, or that [...]

I think this puts it clearly.

Economics professor Greg Mankiw shares some interesting thoughts, citing Paul Krugman, on why Bush’s tax cuts may result in smaller government in the next administration than we would get otherwise. This is likely true, no matter which candidate wins. Krugman, however, calls this a “poison pill,” a way of sabotaging a takeover or transfer of [...]

Thankfully, the Republican party, for all its failings in the last few years, has still some concept of fundamental principles of economics. The Senate blocked a windfall profits tax on oil companies, a tax much like many of the taxes that prolonged the Great Depression in America long past its end elsewhere. Thank goodness for [...]

Or rather, 230,000 of them? That’s the promise (and achievement) of Ning, the latest effort by serial entrepreneur Marc Andreessen. The principle is simple: let people create their own social networks, for whomever and whatever reason. The results are amazing: the site is growing at 0.4% per day and aiming to host 4 million networks [...]

Both Sarah and I are going to be blogging and commenting at Professor Picker’s Antitrust & Intellectual Property seminar blog (called, for some reason, the Tech Policy Seminar blog) this quarter. The current topic of discussion is Jean-Noël Jeanneney‘s Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge, translated from the French Quand Google défie l’Europe: Plaidoyer [...]

I am, I admit, a paleocapitalist and (mostly a) paleoconservative. That said, I do not think oil company executives – or any other corporate executives – should have to defend their company’s profits, unless illegally gained. For that reason, this meddling strikes me as ridiculous. Lest we forget, oil is among the most volatile and [...]