1. Venn Diagram of the Day (above). Do higher prices/wages reduce demand or not? Inspired by Walter E. Williams’ column yesterday “Liberal Reasoning? Idiotic or Dishonesty?“, here’s a slice:
The Seattle City Council voted unanimously to establish a tax on gun and ammunition sales. Hillary Clinton has called for a 25 percent tax on gun sales. In Chicago, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle proposed “violence taxes” on bullets to discourage criminals from buying guns. Let’s ignore the merit of these measures. They do show that gun grabbers acknowledge the law of demand. They want fewer gun sales and thus propose raising the cost of guns.
But what about raising the cost of hiring workers through increases in the minimum wage? What the liberals believe — and want us to believe — is that though an increase in the cost of anything will cause people to use less of it, labor is exempt from the law of demand. That’s like accepting the idea that the law of gravity influences the falling behavior of everything except nice people. One would have to be a lunatic to believe either proposition.
2. Markets in Everything I. “Leaf” is a “Plug N’ Plant” Box to Automatically Grow Pot in Your Home.
3. Markets in Everything II. The First Airplane That Anyone Can Fly.
4. Finally, A Sensible Proposal from a Member of Congress. Rep. David Schweikert (R-AZ) has introduced legislation that would require some federal agencies to sell cars that they own and subsequently encourage federal employees to use ride-sharing companies to get around town. H.R. 3592 states that its goal is to “establish a pilot program to reduce the number of vehicles owned by certain Federal departments and increase the use of ride-sharing services.”
5. Meanwhile, It’s Politics as Usual in DC. From the WaPo: “It might start to get a lot more difficult to rent out your home on Airbnb soon, if a couple of bills proposed this week make it through the D.C. Council.”
6. The Uber Effect. In 2011, the first year that Uber started operating in New York City, 112 individual taxi medallions were sold between January to August, an average of 14 per month, according to data from the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission. Only one of those 112 taxi medallions that changed hands in 2011 was a foreclosure sale. This year through August, only 12 taxi medallions have sold in the first 8 months of 2015, and 8 of those sales were a results of foreclosure.
7. Who-d a-Thunk It I? Health Insurance Premiums Have Climbed $4,865 Since Obama Promised to Cut Them by $2,500?
8. Who-d a-Thunk It II? Wage/price controls don’t work? Just one among a panel of 42 eminent, politically diverse economists surveyed by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business thinks that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2020 will yield measurable gains in GDP?
9. Who-d a-Thunk It III? Another Green Boondoggle? The LA Times reported this week that “U.S. taxpayers were duped into shelling out $51 million in green subsidies for ‘clean’ VW vehicles.”
10. Chart of the Day (below). “Dear Americans, You’re All Rich” is how Warren Meyer described the chart below, which is from a research article by World Bank economist Branko Milanovic titled “Global Inequality of Opportunity: How Much of our Income is Determined by Where We Live?” David Henderson first blogged about the chart at EconLog back in June.
Milanovic explains below how to interpret the graph:
The graph (for year 2008) shows on the horizontal axis a person’s position in their own country’s income distribution, and on the vertical axis, a person’s position in global income distribution. Thus, the poorest Americans (points 1 or 2 on the horizontal axis) have incomes that put them above the 50th percentile worldwide. Note also that 12% of the richest Americans (points 88 to 100 on the horizontal axis) belong to the global top 1%.
Warren points out that that even the bottom 20th percentile person in the US (point 20 on the horizontal axis) would not just be relatively rich in many other countries, but on a global scale sits around the 85th percentile of world income.
Warren concludes (slightly revised):
The best way to achieve global income equality would be to have more countries emulate the American rule of law, property rights regime, and relatively free markets. Ironically, most American redistributionists support the opposite, arguing that in many was the US should emulate the authoritarianism of these poorer countries. Which I suppose will achieve global income equality as well, though in a much less attractive way.
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