Tag Archives: economics

Global AIDS Crisis is overblown

December 5, 2008

I “dare” to say so. This is a great article. My favorite part: “Diarrhea kills five times as many kids as AIDS,” said John Oldfield, executive vice president of Water Advocates, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that promotes clean water and sanitation. “Everybody talks about AIDS at cocktail parties,” Oldfield said. “But nobody wants to hear about diarrhea,” he said. This is interesting too: “There needs to be a rational system for how to apportion scarce funds,” said Helen Epstein, an [...]

Protectionism and Buying American

August 24, 2008

I have recently been reading Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, and in Chapter 11, Section 2, I found an interesting analysis of tariffs and how they actually hurt everyone except the special interest producer. In his hypothetical example, the consumers pay more for the products, there is less export of American currency to foreign countries, and therefore less export from America, and he even goes on in the following sections about wages decreasing as an effect of tariffs. [...]

Ayn Rand’s Robin Hood

July 11, 2008

Ayn Rand brings up an interesting point about Robin Hood in Atlas Shrugged. She argues that Robin Hood is remembered for robbing from the rich and giving to the poor based on need, and that this is not the correct way to think about the tale. Robin Hood indeed did rob from the rich and gave to the poor, but not because the poor simply needed money, but because the money had been stolen from them by the rulers. This [...]