Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

A Free Market is Always Full of Cheap Ideas

A Free Market is Always Full of Cheap Ideas I may have scoffed in the past at the notion of “the marketplace of ideas” but I am coming around to think that maybe it’s not such a bad metaphor. Back in the days of primitive economy, families, clans, tribes produced and consumed their own subsistence. […]

Did you hear the one about a corporation and a democracy?

Time for a bit of comic relief. (video below the fold)  Julianna reporting on Net Neutrality.  Remember when President Obama said the days of lobbyists setting the agenda was over? I’m posting this here because this is about “markets”.  It is about competition.  It is about freedom.    The free market competition of…wait for it…IDEAS.  It […]

Markets are "natural" …financial intermediation

Lifted from the comments from an Ezra Klein article in the Washington Post comes an interesting idea that is not only currently debated, but also ties into ‘markets are “natural” idea’… Paul Andrews comments:Yes – lots of saving and borrowing, often in goods rather than money. When money is included its often only a fiat […]

More on Markets and Neoliberalism from Crooked Timber

Actual markets in the American economy are extremely rare and unusual beasts. An economics of markets ought to be regarded as generally useful as a biology of cephalopods, amid the living world of bones and shells. But, somehow the idealized, metaphoric market is substituted as an analytic mask, laid across a vast variety of economic […]

Discussion at Crooked Timber on ‘what are markets’

Well, sort of on markets.There is an interesting conversation going on at Crooked Timber our public debate in the econosphere and political rhetoric . Henry posts on the use of arguments over the term neo-liberalism and finishes with: For what it’s worth, I think that the open information agenda, and the political inequality agenda have a […]

Corporate/shareholder value, energy market and global warming

Updated: Renewable Germany bailing out Nuclear France   I just read the following in an article by a Mr. Bill McKibben and thought it to be an interesting perspective on why climate change/global warming is being so vigorously denied. If we spew 565 gigatons more carbon into the atmosphere, we’ll quite possibly go right past […]

What The Rude Pundit Said

Christopher Dodd ruins his reputation: Go read about [SOPA and PIPA], if you haven’t, because it’s pretty insidious stuff, not just because of the governmental control, but because of the corporate power behind it…. Former Senator Chris Dodd, now head of the Motion Picture Association of America (motto: “You can only be our leader if […]

Free market mechanics and healthcare…

by Michael Halasey Free market mechanics and healthcare… Now, I hear something all the time in my work in the health policy realm, and that is that the “free market” could lower prices. I even recently had someone approach me after I mentioned that the PPACA had resulted in an extra million people aged 18-25 […]