Three excellent econoblogger posts

Econobloggers continue to up their game.

William Easterly explains how many advocates of more foreign aid try to skip past the pervasiveness of scarcity via three strategies:  "there really is no scarcity," "our project doesn't use any scarce resources," and "my cause is actually the same as your cause".  A wonderful, concise post.

Mike Munger hammers young Ezra Klein of the Washington Post for not knowing about a little literature called Public Choice. (Mike, being a nice guy, declines a golden opportunity to smack Klein further: when James Buchanan won the Nobel Prize, the reaction of many in the mainstream media was "Yawn. We already knew that!" And no, Klein doesn't deserve a pass for being ignorant of this because he was just getting out of diapers when Buchanan won.)

And Arnold Kling beautifully dismisses "The Progressive Tantrum":

Everyone agrees that the Republicans are just throwing sand in the gears of good government and not offering any ideas. What that means is that they are not offering ideas to enlarge government. Congressman Paul Ryan's ideas do not count, because those would cut back on government, particularly Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. . . .

The important point is that Progressives are never wrong. Top-down reform is the only way to fix the health care system. Anthropogenic global warming is scientifically proven, and its solution requires strenuous exercise of political control over individual behavior. Deficit spending is necessary and sufficient to create jobs. Technocrats can make banks too regulated to fail. Markets without technocratic control are like adolescents without adult supervision. Individual happiness can be improved by political authorities using scientific knowledge. Concentrated political power is the wave of the future, and it is good.

I am not a populist. I fear the mob. But how can I fear the Progressives any less?

Comments

[whosonfirst]

The Super Bowl was a pretty good game but the highlight of the evening was the commercial ridiculing the Green Police.

The "progressives"(they've already ruined the word liberal)are always reaching out for more and more control. The fact that they don't know what they're doing doesn't even slow them down.

[kyle8]

Actually I fear the progressives a whole lot more than I fear the mob. Mob's will sometimes do the right thing even if they go too far, and eventually they will be bored and go about their own lives. Lefties never get tired of trying to control you and never do anything constructive.

[Dave]

"Mike Munger hammers young Ezra Klein of the Washington Post for not knowing about a little literature called Public Choice."

Not really. What Ezra's statement actually was:"what I'd like to see, however, is for people to begin predicting this sort of behavior rather than being surprised by it." This is quite different from not knowing it does not exist. Sounds like your link got all bunched up over misinterpreting what was said. While it's been a while for me, Public Choice says that it can happen, and will happen. I wasn't aware that this journal predicted that Senator McConnell's (perhaps Republicans?) sort of behavior was a lie. Perhaps a pointer?

And since you don't seem to be getting the subtext, his 'for people' really means 'for Fred Hiatt and other members of the Washington establishment to be aware of the fact that Republicans are lying to you, and perhaps remember this the next time they are obviously lying to you, and treat their disingenuous statements appropriately'. Again, this is not lacking awareness that something exists.

And I'm quite sure I can find some of Kling's posts about 'fearing the mob' from back 10 months ago or longer. Otherwise, it would seem that he could be disingenuous about this in order to make a literary point.