Ron Bailey has an interesting piece at Reason about why the US is wealthy, exploding many leftist myths about exploitation and overconsumption of resources, slavery, etc. One point that I think should be added is that, while rule of law is important, if many of the laws are dumb and economically counterproductive, it’s probably better to have less adherence to them than more.

I’d be interested to see a take on this from an Anglosphere perspective.

At 2.3% per capita real income growth, real income doubles every thirty years. That is, we can expect our kids to be roughly twice as rich as we are. In particular, we should stop worrying about them supporting twice as many retirees per capita. We should also stop worrying about their environmental legacy. They will have twice as many billions to devote to environmental cleanup and upgrade even if population remains constant.

One thing that would cause the social security crisis to come back in spades would be if, as is proposed in the UK, that social security is indexed to wages instead of prices. If wages are used, social security payments will double when wages double and longevity and early retirement will bear down on workers.

How much do we owe retirees? Is it the same absolute standard of living as they had when they were working? Their same relative position in the economy? These are expensive moral questions. But recognize a promise of a wage indexed gain for what it is: it is a heavy tax on the working to give more real dollars to the retirees than they gave to the retirees while they were working.

I am still in favor of privatizing government pensions, but that would in effect be a huge cut in subsidization of government borrowing. That is, without the whole social security trust fund invested in government bonds, it will be more expensive to finance government borrowing. That will either require higher taxes, increased borrowing or reduced spending to offset.

One thing I can say about that is that my daughter’s generation will be twice as able to deal with it as mine per capita.

Alan Blinder, former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, goes into why no one knows or cares about the person taking on most powerful position in the world, the Federal Reserve Board Chairmanship.

Listening to the “Beltway Boys” on Brit Hume’s show brings to mind an ongoing frustration with the debate.

Look, tax-rate cut fans (both libertarian and conservatives).

Expunge completely from your vocabulary the phrase “tax cuts.” There’s no sensible way to talk about this concept, because it’s an impossible task. The government has no power to reduce taxes, at least when it comes to income. All that it can do is to reduce tax rates. Reducing tax rates doesn’t necessarily result in reduced taxes, and increasing tax rates doesn’t necessarily result in increased taxes.

It’s like the video games that allow you to control velocity, but not position. Actually, it’s not even like that, because physics is physics, and you can learn how to get somewhere with a velocity controller, but economics is unpredictable.

Those of us who want to promote economic growth have to change the vocabulary, and get people to stop talking about “tax cuts,” because there’s no such thing in any predictable way. Doing so may make it easier to persuade people to support lower rates, and an increase in wealth for everyone.

Listening to the “Beltway Boys” on Brit Hume’s show brings to mind an ongoing frustration with the debate.

Look, tax-rate cut fans (both libertarian and conservatives).

Expunge completely from your vocabulary the phrase “tax cuts.” There’s no sensible way to talk about this concept, because it’s an impossible task. The government has no power to reduce taxes, at least when it comes to income. All that it can do is to reduce tax rates. Reducing tax rates doesn’t necessarily result in reduced taxes, and increasing tax rates doesn’t necessarily result in increased taxes.

It’s like the video games that allow you to control velocity, but not position. Actually, it’s not even like that, because physics is physics, and you can learn how to get somewhere with a velocity controller, but economics is unpredictable.

Those of us who want to promote economic growth have to change the vocabulary, and get people to stop talking about “tax cuts,” because there’s no such thing in any predictable way. Doing so may make it easier to persuade people to support lower rates, and an increase in wealth for everyone.

Listening to the “Beltway Boys” on Brit Hume’s show brings to mind an ongoing frustration with the debate.

Look, tax-rate cut fans (both libertarian and conservatives).

Expunge completely from your vocabulary the phrase “tax cuts.” There’s no sensible way to talk about this concept, because it’s an impossible task. The government has no power to reduce taxes, at least when it comes to income. All that it can do is to reduce tax rates. Reducing tax rates doesn’t necessarily result in reduced taxes, and increasing tax rates doesn’t necessarily result in increased taxes.

It’s like the video games that allow you to control velocity, but not position. Actually, it’s not even like that, because physics is physics, and you can learn how to get somewhere with a velocity controller, but economics is unpredictable.

Those of us who want to promote economic growth have to change the vocabulary, and get people to stop talking about “tax cuts,” because there’s no such thing in any predictable way. Doing so may make it easier to persuade people to support lower rates, and an increase in wealth for everyone.

The amount of energy used in the economy per real dollar of GDP, “Energy Intensity”, has been steadily dropping and is now about half what it was in 1950. So a barrel’s worth of oil in 1950 now stretches to two barrels worth of work.

This is before the coming hybrid capital turnover in the transportation sector to double the efficiency there. So I guess prices will have to nearly double again to curb energy use like the 1970s oil shocks.

Apparently, they haven’t read my TechCentralStation piece. Here come the dumb stories about “price gouging”:

“They are gouging me–$1,600 for a $700 generator,” complained Aventura resident Jorge Linkewer, who bought the device despite the price. “My kids have medication that needs to be refrigerated.”

Apparently he’d rather have no generator for his kids’ medication at $700, than an actual one for $1600. Because that would have been a likely outcome had the price not increased, to discourage someone from buying one who just wanted to run his big-screen television.

There were 116 million homes in the US during the 2000 census. Now there are a couple hundred thousand fewer homes in the world and a couple hundred thousand more houses that people have been chased out of. That should fuel the housing price outside of New Orleans in several ways. First, more people will be purchasing homes outside of New Orleans. Second, more people will be renting homes outside of New Orleans driving up the price of substitutes. Third, building materials will be in high demand for a while driving up the cost of building new. Weighing against the bubble is the depression a lot of people face about the future.

High energy prices is kind of mixed for housing prices–it raises prices on close-in houses, lowers it on suburb houses, decreases business confidence, but may increase nominal house prices due to inflation.

In New Orleans, we are likely to see some fire sale prices. It is a good time to start a vulture fund to snap up those houses. New Orleans is likely to have a renaissance the same way that San Francisco, Boston and Chicago did after their big disasters.