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Art Carden

Tariff Musings

Economists have been beating the drum for free trade for at least two and a half centuries, at least since Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations. People refuse to learn, or they just don't care. The new tariffs--calculated incoherently from meaningless data--will bring a big price tag.

Your Job Means More Than You Think: Rethinking Job Descriptions

When people think about meaningful jobs that make a difference, they usually don’t think about janitors, auto mechanics, baristas, fast food workers, middle managers, and secretaries. However, when you think about these jobs, they mean a lot more than you might think. You might be familiar with people inflating

I Listen to Things: Led Zeppelin Covers & Remakes

As a rule, I don't listen to music with lyrics while I'm working--but rules are made to be broken. Sometimes I just need some inspiration, and Amazon, Apple, YouTube, and other streaming services offer a cornucopia. Unlimited economic progress is one of the themes in Strangers

Should We Cheer A Sinking Ship?

You pick up the Wall Street Journal and read a headline announcing that the U.S. is headed for another record trade deficit. Remembering that GDP is the sum of Consumption, Investment, Government Purchases, and Net Exports, you fret because the equation Y = C + I + G + (X-IM) (where X is

#FreeBookFriday: David Friedman on Price Theory and Radical Capitalism

David D. Friedman, son of 1976 Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, describes himself as someone who teaches economics in a law school despite never having taken a course in either. Despite this, he has made important contributions to the theories of anarchy and capitalism. Furthermore, he has graciously made some of

Why Go To College?

Why go to college? Three reasons: For a Credential. For a lot of students, college is about making friends and memories for a few years before getting out with a credential everyone sees as a ticket to the middle class--but not because you learned anything useful. As Bryan Caplan explains,

#FreeBookFriday: Last Set of Gratis "Mere Economics" Sources

Robert L. Schuettinger and Eamonn F. Butler, Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls: How Not to Fight Inflation. Milton M. Shapiro, Foundations of the Market Price System. Sun Tzu, The Art of War. Francis Wayland, The Elements of Political Economy. Philip H. Wicksteed, The Commonsense of Political Economy. And

Recent Reading: Journal Articles on Environmentalism and Housing

Mark Pennington, "Liberty, Markets, and Environmental Values: A Hayekian Defense of Free-Market Environmentalism," Independent Review 2005. One of several takeaways: environmental communitarians want to take decisions about what gets used where, when, and how out of the marketplace and put them in spaces that are democratic and deliberative--but

#FreeBookFriday: More "Mere Economics" Sources

John Meadowcroft (ed.), Prohibitions. Don't like something? Banning it may not be a very good idea, to put it mildly. Ludwig von Mises, Lots of Stuff. Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, Economic Freedom and Interventionism, Human Action, Planning for Freedom, and Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis,

Four Ways to Get What You Want

This essay was originally published at the American Institute for Economic Research. How can you get what you want? Years ago, Clarence Carson pointed out that fundamentally, there are four ways, and Paul Cleveland and I explored this in a 2010 article in The Freeman. They are worth revisiting: You