Mere Economics

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Latest — 22 May 2025

The Trade War Endgame

Once again, over at the Independent Institute, Scott Burns and I tackle the recent trade goings-on. This time, we focus on the contradictory rationales that have been offered for the administration's trade policies. A snippet: Governments need to raise revenue. They also need to buttress their economy and

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The Market and the Family of God

Sometimes people balk at the idea of a society based on “abstract,” “cold,” and “impersonal” rules. Why not, they say, run society like a family? The church is the family of God, and after all, no (good) father charges his children for food or diapers. A well-functioning family runs on

It's the Small Stuff: Look Around At Our World of Wonders

I've long loved Don Boudreaux's metaphor of the prosperity pool. Every new innovation, convenience, or increase in output is a drop in the prosperity pool: "a modern, prosperous market economy... is largely the result of many small innovations, each of which is not very significant

Sennholz Sense

When all the mysticism is stripped away, the people who comprise the government (the legislators, administrators, judges, and policemen), are guided by human interests, desires, beliefs, notions, and prejudices, just like other people. They have neither superhuman wisdom nor extraordinary virtue. From his "Degenerate Democracy."

The "Strong Tendencies" of Economics?

We live in an orderly physical universe governed by unyielding, unforgiving non-negotiables like Newton’s universal law of gravitation and mathematical regularities like pi and e. Virtually no one denies this, and doing so will rightly get you labeled a kook. We also live in an orderly social universe governed

In This House, We Believe Demand Curves Slope Downward to the Right I

This series of posts is adapted from an essay originally published on my personal blog, A Fuller's Soap. During graduate school lecturing, a friend who I won’t name once joked, “We’ve covered downward sloping demand curves—what else is there to teach them?” Less flippantly, Armen

The Global Division of Knowledge Improved on "Batman"

My youngest loves the Batman movies and video games, so when it was his night to choose a move, he chose the 1989 version of Batman starring Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson, and Kim Basinger. I was surprised at how poorly it held up. Everything seemed hokey, the special effects made

Price Controls: The Greatest Hits IV

Economists thought price controls had been vanquished, but we live in a world where people are warming up to them. In this series, based on an article originally published at The Independent Institute, I'll revisit some of the craziest consequences of price controls. Price controls lower the costs

Say Says

There are some truths so completely self-evident, that demonstration is quite superfluous. This is one of that number. For who will attempt to deny, that the certainty of enjoying the fruits of one’s land, capital and labour, is the most powerful inducement to render them productive? Or who is

The Global Division of Knowledge Gives Us "Andor"

Like a lot of Star Wars fans, I've been kind of disappointed in the franchise since Disney took it over. I liked The Force Awakens a lot and absolutely loved Rogue One. I thought The Last Jedi was interesting--a good movie on its own--but it created a lot