Malinvestment in Human Capital

by Jerry O’Driscoll

The Weekend Wall Street Journal has a front-page article on labor mismatch: “Help Wanted: In Unexpected Twist, Some Skilled Jobs Go Begging.” It focuses on the problems that the Union Pacific Railroad is experiencing trying to hire skilled workers to keep the trains rolling. These include electricians who work on diesel engines.

It is a widespread problem: the article reports survey results showing that 83 percent of manufacturers reported a moderate or severe shortage of skilled production workers.

Is USPS as American as Pumpkin Pie?

Chidem Kurdas

The United States Postal Service is in a deep financial hole that looks to get deeper unless the institution undergoes a major revamp.  Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe says current bills in Congress do not provide enough savings to get out of the hole.

US Mail has historical roots. What would Benjamin Franklin, who was appointed the first American Postmaster General in 1775 by the Continental Congress, do in this situation? Given the flexibility that existed in his time, he could no doubt make the changes to adapt the organization to the 21^st century.  That flexibility, however, is gone. 

Sliding Toward the Individual Health Insurance Mandate: An Absurdist Analysis

by Mario Rizzo

I am not an expert in US Constitutional law, but I am not totally uninformed either. And yet (or because of this) I was shocked to see the completely crazy “analysis” that appeared, as an opinion piece, in the Wednesday, November 16^th issue of the New York Times. The author is the anti-trust and health law scholar Einer R. Elhauge of the Harvard Law School. I am somewhat relieved to find that he is not a constitutional law expert either.

Nevertheless, the article is notable for how casually it treats the legal issues.

Energy Policy vs. Market

by Chidem Kurdas

No matter how thoroughly public policy fails, there is no end to efforts in the same area.  Energy is a case in point. Reviewing the history of US energy policy in his new book, Columbia University legal scholar Michael Graetz writes: “The book  is, then, in one sense a story of failure…” 

Radical Ignorance in the Financial Crisis

by Sandy Ikeda

Jeffrey Friedman and Wladimir Kraus have a new book out, Engineering the Financial Crisis, (Univ. Penn Press) that grew out of research that first appeared in Critical Review back in 2009 on the “Causes of the Crisis.”  Friedman’s lead article in that issue did an excellent job of providing a detailed but readable description of the institutional setting of the crisis and an account of the complex events, domestic and international, that led to it.  I’ve only skimmed the book, but it appears offer a similar kind of useful description and analysis of these and many other events surrounding the crisis.

What distinguishes this book, and what may be of particular interest to readers of this blog, is it’s explicitly Austrian perspective on the role of ignorance, in the private but especially the public sector, as the analytical starting point of the crisis.

The meta-mistake that economists make in ignoring ignorance (or in reducing it to “rational” or deliberate ignorance or to “asymmetric information,” where one party does know the truth) is suggestive, we think, of the problems that modern democracy faces:  If economists are our most important advisers, but their worldviews have no place for genuine human error, we are in deep trouble (151).

A rationalist constructivist hubris led public authorities to create a “hybrid capitalism” that incited entrepreneurs to ever riskier investments, the consequences of which no one could foresee though they perhaps might have imagined.  The book’s title Engineering the Financial Crisis captures that idea well.

The Infrastructure Death Rattle

by Mario Rizzo

The incessant discussion and demand for job-creating infrastructure spending on the part of the news media, Democratic politicians, and some unreconstructed Keynesian economists is both frustrating and pathetic. It is frustrating because how many times can people repeat the same thing without listening to the objections? It is pathetic because the level of understanding is akin to pre-Newtonian physics.

The Crisis in the EU

by Jerry O’Driscoll

I addressed the Greek situation and the wider EU debt crisis in an op ed in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, November 2^nd (“Why We Can’t Escape the Eurocrisis”). It is also posted today on the Cato homepage. I explain the linkages between the US and the EU, particularly among financial institutions.

Banks within the EU finance the deficits of their governments. It is not just that Greek banks buy Greek sovereign debt, but French banks lend to Greek banks. And French banks buy the bonds of the Italian government. US banks lend to EU banks. Less well known, US money market funds hold a good amount of debt issued by EU banks. And the Fed is backstopping dollar funding of EU banks.

Sovereign defaults over there will have a big impact over here. And, then, there is our own public debt problem. And it is not just public-sector debt that afflicts both economies, but, to varying degrees, excessive leverage in the household and nonfinancial corporate sectors.

Last night, Judge Napolitano interviewed me for a segment on “Freedom Watch.”

The Judge was interested in not only the economic issues, but also political issues.

The lead segment was with John Allison, former CEO of BB&T, who decried the crony capitalism that is at the root of the crisis here and there. It was enjoyable to hear a former banker denounce rent seeking by banks. He even used the word “rents.”