Your Teacher Said What?!
Page 24
Hardin, Garrett
Harris, Lee
Hartshorn, Cora
Hartshorn, Stewart
Hartshorn roller shade
Hayek, Friedrich
Hazelwood, Joseph
health care
reform (See health-care reform)
health-care reform
mandate to purchase insurance
Massachusetts model for
price signals, lack of
public option
rationing of health care
single-payer system
health foods
hedging
Henrich, Joseph
Heritage Foundation
Higgs, Robert
Higgs effect
Home Depot
Hoot (movie)
Hubbert, M. King
Huffington Post
Hughes, Howard
Hume, David
hyperinflation
“I, Pencil: My Family Tree as Told to Leonard E. Read” (Read)
iCarly (TV show)
immigration
entrepreneurship and
Israel and
income tax
Incredibles, The (movie)
Industrial Revolution
industrial unions
inflation
information. See also price signals
innovation
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, An (Smith)
intellectual property rights
interest
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
internal locus of control
International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts (IATSE)
International Brotherhood of Teamsters
inventions
Israel
Jeter, Derek
Jones, Phil
Jones Act
Keynes, John Maynard
Keynesianism
King Kullen
Koppel, Ted
Krauthammer, Charles
Krugman, Paul
labeling regulations
labor freedom
labor relations
labor theory of value
labor unions. See unions
Langone, Kent
Lectures on Jurisprudence (Smith)
Lehman Brothers
Lenape Indians
leverage
liberals
licensing laws
Locke, John
Long Island Railroad
McDonald’s
McGovern, George
Mackey, John
Madison, James
Major League Baseball Players Association
mandate to purchase health insurance
Mann, Michael
Marcus, Bernie
Marshall, Alfred
Marx, Karl
Massachusetts health care plan
May Day protests
medical schools, regulation of
mercantilism
middlemen
Miron, Jeffrey
Mises, Ludwig von
Modern Times (movie)
monetary inflation
monopolies
monopsony
Monsanto
mortgages
Mother Jones
movie industry. See television and movie industry
Moynihan, Daniel Patrick
Nader, Ralph
Nadler, Jerrold
nanny state. See state socialism
The Narcissism of Minor Differences: How America and Europe Are Alike (Baldwin)
National Education Association
National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)
National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA)
National Labor Relations Act of 1935
National Labor Relations Board (NLRB),
negative income tax
Nestle, Marion
Netanyahu, Benjamin
New Deal
New York Times
Wall Street Journal editorials compared
Nickelodeon
Nightline (TV show)
Nixon, Richard
Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932
nuclear power plants
nutrition labeling
Nye, John
Obama, Barack Hussein
Obama, Michelle
Obama administration
oil
peak oil
reserves
Olbermann, Keith
oligopolies
oligopsony
Omnivore’s Dilemma, The (Pollan)
O’Neal, Shaquille
opportunity cost
scarcity and
Organic Food Alliance
organic foods
Pan Am
patents
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
peak oil
Pelosi, Nancy
per capita GDP
growth in, American vs. European
perfect competition
Pew Research Center
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (movie)
Pirates of the Caribbean (movie)
Pixar
Playhouse 90 (TV show)
Pollan, Michael
prescription drugs
prevailing wages
price
price gouging
price inelasticity
price signals
profit
progressive income tax
Progressives and Progessivism passim
American style economy, view of
climate change and
deficit reduction plan and
distrust for free markets
economic literacy and
educators and
fair trade and
health care reform and
organic foods and
parenting and
progress and
reaction to midterm elections of 2010 of
regulation and
tax cuts and
unions and
Prohibition
Promise of American Life, The (Croly)
property rights
in bison
in broadcasting channels
commodities and
environmentalism and
intellectual property rights
labor theory of value and
ownership by might
possession and
and protection of land
in real property
in timber
usufruct distinguished from
Prout, William
public option
public safety rationale for regulation
public sector unions
Quintanilla, Carl
Railway Labor Act of 1926
Ratatouille (movie)
rationing of health care
Rawls, John
Read, Leonard
Reagan, Ronald
real property
Reason
recession
defined
Great Recession
regressive income tax
regulation
antiscalping
of banks
to correct failures of the market
labeling
licensing laws
of medical schools
Progressives and
public safety rationale for
unintended consequences of
res nullius
Restoring American Financial Stability Act. See Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Bill
Ricardo, David
Rich, Frank
risk
Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek)
Rock of Ages (play)
Romney, Mitt
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, Theodore
salaries. See compensation
Salazar, Ken
Sanders, Bernie
Santelli, Ri
ck
Saturday Night Live (TV show)
scarcity
Schumpeter, Joseph
Scorsese, Martin
Senor, Dan
Service Employees International Union (SEIU)
Sherk, James
shoelace manufacturing process, elements of
shortages
Shrek (movie)
Sierra Club
Simon, Julian
single-payer system
Smith, Adam
smoking. See cigarette smoking
Spirited Away (movie)
Squawk Box (TV show)
stagflation
Star bucks
Start-Up Nation (Senor)
state socialism
stimulus, fiscal
stocks
Stone, Oliver
Stossel, John
subprime loans
substitution principle
Sunstein, Cass
supermarkets
supply curve
tax cuts
teachers’ unions
Tea Party
television and movie industry
CEOs as villains
environmental romanticism
multinational corporations as villains
negative views on business of
property rights in broadcast spectrum and
underdog perspective
tenure
30 Rock (TV show)
timber, property rights in
Time
Time for Kids
Tocqueville, Alexis de
tragedy of the commons
Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP)
Truman, Harry
Trumka, Richard
trust
credit and
free markets
Ultimatum
underdog perspective, in movies
unions
card check and
craft
disability/pension payments received by members of
economic impacts of
history of
industrial
legislation benefiting
political impact of
public sector
teachers’
wage impacts of
United Auto Workers (UAW )
United Parcel Service (UPS)
United States Chamber of Commerce
United States Postal Service
Up (movie)
usufruct
vacation
vegans
Viacom
virtues, and free-market capitalism
voluntary associations
wages. See compensation
Wahl, Eugene
Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the WereRabbit (movie)
Wall-E (movie)
Wall Street Journal
New York Times editorials compared
Wall Street (movie)
Walmart
Warren, Elizabeth
Washington Post
Waters, Alice
Wealth of Nations, The (Smith)
Welch, Jack
welfare
Whitney, Eli
Whole Foods
Wire, The (TV show)
Yglesias, Matthew
You’ve Got Mail (movie)
1 Or even making comments about my waistline on the CNBC Web site, which really hurt.
2 Bad as the Great Depression was for the country, it was a golden age for the Cubs: Between 1929 and 1939, they won the National League pennant five times. On the other hand, they didn’t win the World Series even once; they were, after all, still the Cubs.
3 Note that Mrs. Obama, who had traced her family’s financial success to her husband ’s two best-selling books, earned $121,910 in 2004 . . . and after her husband was elected to the U. S. Senate in 2005, $316,962.
4 This is actually one way that twenty-first-century century Progressives differ from their early-twentieth-century ancestors, who were eager to adopt labor-saving technologies, possibly because they still remembered the backbreaking labor associated with preindustrial farming and manufacturing. Whenever you hear the word “artisanal ” spoken approvingly in reference to clothing or food, you are in the presence of a Progressive.
5 For information on how movies and television aimed at children reinforce this idea, see chapter 5.
6 Sometimes called “Pareto efficient” or “Pareto optimal ” for the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who defined it as a situation where it is impossible to make someone better off without making someone else worse off. Kind of like free agency in baseball.
7 For more on fair trade, see chapter 8.
8 Because the “D” in GDP stands for “domestic” expenditure, calculations have to take out the value of imports and exports . . . not that you asked.
9 Not as much as it sounds. This quantity of gold would be a cube about one hundred feet on a side.
10 This is true in the Northeast, which I now know adopted the old English system, called “metes and bounds,” in colonial times. Beginning in 1785, on territory that would become my home state of Ohio, the rest of the country was surveyed with a far more modern system: the Pubic Land Survey System.
11 The deed description, which I found in our locallibrary, begins, “Bounded and limited with the bay eastward and the great River Pesayak northward, to the great Creke or River in the meadow, running to the head of the Cove, and from thence bareing a westerly line for the south bound, which said great Creek is commonly called. . . .”
12 Hardin was nothing if not consistent, contending in the same article that the same logic argued for government control of reproduction, with the famous argument that there is “no right to breed.” The Nobel Prize–winning economist Elinor Ostrom demonstrated why, despite Hardin’s logic, the world was not, in fact, a desert . . . but he is still regarded as a hero of the environmental movement.
13 For more about the Kernen family’s eating habits, see chapter 8.
14 Since then, it has, in constant dollars, more than quintupled. Thank you, inventors.
15 It’s also, in a very different setting, why you can buy a reserved seat for a play but not for a movie: It costs just as much to hire ushers to make sure that no one sits in your $10 seat at the local multiplex as it does to hire ushers to make sure no one sits in your $100 seat in a Broadway theater.
16 Old-school guys like Koppel probably even believe in their own objectivity, which is the saddest part of all. For more about media confusion, see chapter 5.
17 Central planners have been attacking Bt cotton pretty regularly, though, despite its demonstrated ability to improve yields using far less toxic insecticides. Central planners tend to be Progressives, and Progressives haven’t got a lot of love for genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.
18 Acetate actually comes from the same wood-pulp mill as the raw material for the cardboard with which the laces are packaged.
19 For more about Hayek, see chapter 2.
20 The term has actually been used by engineers for fifty years as shorthand for a material that is perfect for some use but doesn’t exist, like a wire with no mass that conducts electricity with no resistance.
21 For that, you’ll have to read chapter 8.
22 Although I still think the best travel book ever written is Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad, in which he famously complains about having Michelangelo (he calls him Michael Angelo) for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and between meals, finally admitting that he “never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with a blessed peace, as I did yesterday when I learned that Michael Angelo was dead.”
23 You start trying to teach your children and end up learning a lot yourself. One thing I learned about was a man named Eugen Richter, a man who spent his life supporting free markets and trade and opposing both Germany’s socialists and Chancellor Bismarck. Richter wrote a book titled Pictures of the Socialistic Future, in which he parodied—sort of—the kind of welfare state in whic
h emigration is prohibited, since “persons who owe their education and training to the State cannot be accorded the right to emigrate, so long as they are of an age when they are obliged to work.” Which doesn’t say much about the United States but is a pretty good description of, oh, say, East Germany.
24 China and India are giant economic powers, but mostly because of their giant populations. China’s per-capita GDP is essentially the same as Angola’s; India’s is less than Mongolia’s.
25 It would be poetic justice of a sort if Paul Krugman had a Harvard pedigree, but his academic credentials come from Yale and MIT, and he now teaches at Princeton. Same difference.
26 For more on unionism, see chapter 9.
27 For more on the law in question—the Davis-Bacon Act—see chapter 9.
28 For more on financial regulation, see chapter 2.
29 Yet another regulation—the Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE—tells automobile companies what the average mileage of cars has to be.
30 I’m not making up either of these. The Obama administration has reinstated the Clintonera regulations intended to prevent carpal tunnel syndrome, regulations that will cost between $4 billion and $100 billion annually. And the new $600 gas threshold? Part of (don’t laugh) health-care reform—a provision that even the IRS itself calls “disproportionate as compared with any resulting improvement in tax compliance” (IRS Report Number IR-2010-83, July 7, 2010, “National Taxpayer Advocate Submits Mid-Year Report to Congress”).
31 We could give some credit to Jimmy Carter for deregulating the price of natural gas, but we’d have to take away points for the $20 billion he invested in the conversion of coal into natural gas because of a “shortage” that vanished once he deregulated its price. In fact, his deregulation-regulation-deregulation policies were so clumsy that—did I mention it was Jimmy Carter?
32 Borlaug, who died in 2009, also estimated that it would take an additional five billion cows to produce enough “natural” fertilizer to produce the needed nitrogen, to say nothing of uncounted tons of methane, a greenhouse gas. How Progressives can, at the same time, be against both global warming and synthetic fertilizers (and Borlaug himself, who supported intensive agriculture as the best defense against deforestation) escapes me. But they are. At a 2002 meeting in Rome that included Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, the final conference report blamed the Green Revolution for the rise in world hunger.