A recent front-page story in the Wall Street Journal told of rising hunger and malnutrition amid chronic agricultural surpluses in India. India is now exporting wheat, and even donating some to Afghanistan, while malnutrition is a growing problem within India itself....
Ladies and gentlemen, it is understandable to want to help out poor families, and toward that end it has been suggested that Congress increase the minimum wage, from the current $5.15 an hour to $6.65 an hour. Well, I have good news and bad news for you. The bad news...
During the gasoline shortage that began in 1979, motorists were often waiting in long lines of cars at filling stations -- sometimes for hours -- in hopes of reaching the pump before the gas ran out. The ways that Ted Kennedy and Ronald Reagan proposed to deal with...
History has seen many calls for minimum wages for the same reason — to eliminate competition with workers who’d work for less.
Businessmen in Santa Fe, New Mexico, are going to court to defend their most basic economic right--the ability to voluntarily negotiate wages with their employees. Last month, the Santa Fe city council voted to raise the minimum wage to $10.50 per hour over the next...
When Hawaii recently passed a law controlling how high the price of gasoline can go in that state, it was the first law controlling the price of gasoline since 1981, when President Ronald Reagan ended federal control over oil prices. What was unusual about the...
Even the Department of Energy's study found that price caps -- which, let's not forget, are what got California into this mess in the first place -- won't improve the energy situation. In fact, they'll likely make it worse. The study concluded that a $150 "hard cap"...
It was only a passing news item when the financial information service Standard & Poor's lowered the rating it gave to bonds issued by the state of California. But it has big implications and it also shows the big difference between economics and politics. At the...
The last time so many people were as bedeviled as the people of California are today by electrical blackouts was back in 1979, when motorists in cities across the country were lined up for hours at filling stations, waiting to get gas. Both shortages had the same...
As an economist, whenever I hear the word "shortage" I wait for the other shoe to drop. That other shoe is usually "price control." So it was no great surprise to discover, after the electric power shortage in California made headlines, that there were price controls...
Warning: Over certain issues, otherwise intelligent people may, repeat, may suffer instantaneous, and often irreversible, brain-freeze. Take the minimum wage. The City Council in Santa Monica, Calif., a town also known as "Moscow on the Pacific," just voted...
Every so often, without fail, the Republicans remind me why I don't join the party. A recovering drug and alcohol abuser, living in the streets, recently told me the following story. One day, in desperate need of money, he went to the owner of a convenience store. The...
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