Economic Thinking Posts on Debate Topics
Inequality of income and wealth are different than inequality of legal status. Social equity requires equal access to a just rule of law. The great British, American, and French revolutions advanced western world legal...
Titled “Ageless Iraq” the short British film below presents an optimistic view of life in Iraq in the 1950s. Iraq was home to far fewer people in the 1950s, just five million compared to...
Governments want citizens to have access to education, but that doesn’t mean governments should run schools. Similarly, governments have an interest in monitoring visitors and immigrants to keep terrorists out. But that doesn’t mean...
Sustainability and Equity: A Better Future for All is the subtitle of the 2011 United Nations Development Report. The full report is here (pdf), Sustainability and equity are themes in each year’s United Nations...
Cato Unbound is featuring a discussion among economists on limiting freedom in order to provide equity, in the form of a guaranteed minimum income. The discussion begins with Matt Zwolinski’s essay “The Pragmatic Libertarian...
Military disasters can spread rapidly in and around Syria and Iraq. Battlegrounds feed radical ideologies, from Bolshevism in Russia after World War I, Communism in Eastern Europe after World War II, and Maoism in...
There are a great many reasons to not value freedom above equity. Which is good news for debaters facing the NCFCA LD value topic: Resolved: In the realm of economics, freedom ought to be valued...
U.S. policy is apparently to destabilize one of the few stable Middle East territories. By blocking sale of oil from Iraqi Kurdistan, in deference to corrupt Shia-dominated Iraqi government, U.S. policy throws a wrench...
The New York Times ran an interesting story on the economic benefits of building yachts. Titled “Seeing a Supersize Yacht as a Job Engine, Not a Self-Indulgence,” it’s the story of St. Louis zillionaire...
A few overheads from presentation on the economics of federal electronic surveillance policies. Economics is about incentives. Everything else is commentary. Economics is not just about private companies that produce, trade, compete, and try...