Econocentric

Saturday, November 5, 2011

Spending and Taxes as a Percent of GDP

Scott Drum: I've spent most of the last 40 years in the field of economics, both academically and in the real world. Milton Friedman used to give a lecture at the University of Chicago about how really simple economics was. By that he meant that most things that you observe can be explained by some very simple rules -- e.g. That which you tax you will get less of; that which you subsidize you will get more of. Or that millions of people making millions of individual decisions for themselves are more likely to arrive at an optimum answer than a room full of Wise Men in Washington or London or Beijing. He also said that when you observe something that doesn't seem to make sense, you should look to see how the rules and markets are being distorted to obtain an outcome that those millions of people would not have freely chosen. This blog is mostly about those observations.

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