All Posts Tagged With: "incentives"

Protecting America’s Health: The FDA, Business, and One Hundred Years of Regulation

George Stigler once compared regulating on the basis of corporate misdeeds to an audition at which the second singer is selected after only the first has sung. When it comes to food and health, Philip Hilts, a veteran medical reporter, runs the same sort of abbreviated audition. His latest book is an eminently readable, amply [...]

7Jul2010 | | 1 comment | Continued

But Is There Such a Thing as a Free Breakfast?

Back in the mid-eighties I participated in a conference of small business owners. (Very small—my own multinational corporation consists of me, my wife, and a dog. The dog is part-time.) One workshop leader explained that we could no longer deduct 100 percent of business travel meals. Henceforth, we could only deduct 80 percent (that dropped [...]

27Jun2010 | | 0 comments | Continued

Mr. Obama and the Bankers: “Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly”

Speaking to a very receptive Elyria, Ohio, crowd a few months ago, President Obama took off the gloves and promised that he was ready to fight to provide more jobs, improved education, and security from the threat of bankruptcy for homeowners. Turning his attention to the Wall Street bankers, who had just announced another round [...]

20Apr2010 | | 1 comment | Continued

Democracy, Deficit, and Debt

Democracy in Deficit is one of those books that can profoundly change the way people think about economics.

8Apr2010 | | 8 comments | Continued

TGIF: Perverse Health Care Incentives

The common impulse for “health care reform” is entirely honorable. It is distressing to know that so many people are vulnerable to bankruptcy-threatening medical bills or to raw deals from State-cartelized insurance companies. Who wouldn’t change that if he could? The question is: Which approach has a better chance of changing it? Centralized bureaucratic decision-making [...]

11Dec2009 | | 0 comments | Continued

Perverse Health Care Incentives

Ronald Brownstein of The Atlantic is the only mainstream reporter I am aware of who glimpses what the debate over health care economics should be about. Last month he wrote, “To save costs, Democrats mostly want to change the incentives for providers. Republicans mostly want to change the incentives for patients by shifting toward a [...]

11Dec2009 | | 9 comments | Continued

Poker and the Free Market

Good poker players are like entrepreneurs: You need greater skill than average to anticipate the future. As Mises so cogently puts it in Human Action, “What distinguishes the successful entrepreneur and promoter from other people is precisely the fact that he does not let himself be guided by what was and is, but arranges his affairs on the ground of his opinion about the future. He sees the past and the present as other people do; but he judges the future in a different way.”

20Jan2009 | | 2 comments | Continued

The State Is Morally Hazardous To Your Health

It’s never been more important for advocates of individual liberty to emphasize that what is failing today is not the free market but the state. To claim otherwise is to ignore generations of pervasive and deep-seated privilege through government interference with the marketplace. Intentions are irrelevant. The laws of economics proceed whether those who interfere [...]

1May2008 | | 1 comment | Continued

Always Think of Incentives

While visiting FEE a few years ago, I was lucky enough to hear a talk by the “armchair economist,” Professor Steven Landsburg. In it he remarked that most of economics could be summarized in just two sentences: “Resources are scarce” and “People respond to incentives.” These two apparently simple and obvious observations are in fact [...]

1Oct2006 | | 2 comments | Continued

The FDA Cannot Be Reformed

The past year or so has been tough on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In that time, the agency has taken heat over the discovery of a statistical correlation between antidepressants and “suicidal thinking and behavior.” It has also been accused of sitting on information regarding another statistical correlation, this time between pain drugs [...]

1Jul2005 | | 0 comments | Continued

Law and Good Intentions

Americans, not just classical-liberal ones, have an almost instinctual distrust of government. Our nation began in a revolt inspired partly by the “Intolerable Acts” of King George III and taxation without representation. The Declaration of Independence recited a lengthy list of grievances against the British government, summarized as “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, [...]

1Jun2005 | | 2 comments | Continued

How the Western Cattlemen Created Property Rights

During the last third of the nineteenth century, entrepreneurs created a vast open-range cattle industry in the Great Plains region of the United States. During the War Between the States, when Texas had been cut off from free-flowing commerce with the rest of the country, huge herds of cattle had built up on the state’s [...]

1Mar2005 | | 0 comments | Continued

Private Enterprise Regained

Governor Bradford’s own history of the Plymouth Bay Colony over which he presided is a story that deserves to be far better known—particularly in an age that has acquired a mania for socialism and communism, regards them as peculiarly “progressive” and entirely new, and is sure that they represent “the wave of the future.” Most [...]

1Nov2004 | | 3 comments | Continued

The Great Horse-Manure Crisis of 1894

We commonly read or hear reports to the effect that “If trend X continues, the result will be disaster.” The subject can be almost anything, but the pattern of these stories is identical. These reports take a current trend and extrapolate it into the future as the basis for their gloomy prognostications. The conclusion is, [...]

1Sep2004 | | 100 comments | Continued

Aviation, People, and Incentives

Ralph Hood is a pilot, a member of the Alabama Aviation Hall of Fame, and a writer in Huntsville, Alabama. An economist once said that economics can be summed up in four words—“people react to incentives.” Yes, and competition speeds the process. Incentives and competition working together generate money, effort, and progress. This has been [...]

1Dec2003 | | 0 comments | Continued

Medical Care and Market Forces

I’ve heard it argued that market forces don’t apply to health care because there isn’t anything close to a free market in health care. There are all these government programs, and there’s insurance, and patients don’t have as much information as doctors. The list of market “imperfections” is a long one. Supply and demand just [...]

1Oct2003 | | 4 comments | Continued

Profits Versus Love

A few years back we thought about building a deck or a porch on the back of our house. But we decided against it when the estimates started coming in. They were about double what the architect had told us it would cost. Double! Had the architect misled us as a way of encouraging us [...]

1Jun2003 | | 0 comments | Continued
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