The utter stupidity of our ethanol policies

Who says that economists can't agree on anything?  The IGM Economics Experts Panel is unanimous on ethanol policy.

Shocking!! Politics defeats business in state-owned corporations

Here's a shocker.  The Obama Administration refuses to sell its GM shares because it would reveal to the public the many billions of dollars that the taxpayers poured in to bail out the UAW.  Bad political optics will always triumph over good business sense.

Why statists hate corporations

In a nutshell, from David Burge:

'Government' is just a word for things we do together. 'Corporations' is just a word for things we do together voluntarily.

If a central entity isn't forcing you to do things under threat of jail or worse, you're just not doing it for the "right" reasons.

Firefighter tourism

There's a certain genius to this idea. 

Giving the bird in 2012

The prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, has unfriended the IMF on his Facebook page.

Obamanomics explained

For quite some time, I have been trying to figure out the economic model that President Obama has in his head when he devises his ruinous economic policies.  I've been saying for years that his policies tend to be the opposite of what should be put in place, but that's because they were the opposite of the optimal policies that derive from my understanding of how the economy works.  I've had a tough time, however, trying understand how the President thinks his policies are meant to work.

Andrew Klavan has done a pretty good job of this, although I think he's incorrect in equating Obamanomics with Keynesian economics.  Certainly the two have in common the belief that economic stimulus can get an economy out of recession, but I suspect Keynes would be horrified to see how his name is being sullied to justify a government takeover of the private sector, not to mention the infinitely expanding budget deficit.

The broken record of Obamanomics

For those of you who are too young to know what a broken record is, let me explain. Before there were mp3 files, and even before there were compact discs, cassette tapes, and 8-track tapes, there were vinyl records.  These plastic discs had grooves cut into them that served as memory.  Actually, a record had one long spiral groove running from its outer edge to its center.  By rotating a record under a diamond needle, this memory would be transmitted through the record player and out of speakers.  Sometimes, the grooves in the record would become damaged so that the needle would stop following the groove in toward the center of the record and, instead, simply go around and around over the same part of the groove, repeating the same snippet of music until you gave the record player a light smack.

With that in mind, Byron York has a collection of the Obama administrations responses to the dismal job numbers (96,000 net jobs and 368,000 more discouraged workers), each of which reminds us that we should not "read too much into any one monthly report."  The administration is silent, however, on whether it is okay to read something into years of these alarmingly similar reports.