The 14 year reign of Hugo Chávez as President of Venezeula has come to an end with his death at the age of 58. Chávez is a polarising figure; people in the developed world tend either to love him or hate him. There isn’t a lot of nuanced, considered judgement about Chávez on the internet. So today I aim to fill that gap in our collective literature. Let’s find out what, precisely Huge Chávez did for the Venezuelan state and its people, for good or for ill.
Category: Economics
Concerning the nature of man and the economic system, and how best the latter can be structured to augment the former.
Stark Wars Episode III
It’s time for another (and perhaps the final?) round of the Stark/Studebaker Minimum Wage Debate. For those new to this back and forth, Stark, a broadly Keynesian blogger who has my respect, came out against Obama’s proposal to raise the minimum wage to $9 an hour. I responded to his argument, and since then we have had a back and forth. Stark has done us the service of compiling the relevant posts in order here. Stark took issue with some of the casual terminology I employed in my last post, and in the interval between that one and this one we have messaged back and forth via Facebook to sort out for our mutual benefit precisely what one another means. In some cases, I thought Stark’s terminological criticisms pedantic, but in other cases he was right to press for clarification. Fundamentally, if I write a post and an intelligent person (which Stark is) has trouble sorting out what is meant, that’s on me. Now that we have sorted out our positions, Stark has posted his latest attack on the minimum wage hike, and I think myself ready to take it on. So here goes.
The Obama Austerity Package
Even I failed to anticipate that the end of February would approach and the president would make no serious effort at preventing the March 1 budget sequestration from taking effect. At the end of January, we noticed that, with sequester included, the United States was prepared to see an austerity package 1.9% the size of GDP in 2013, more austerity as a share of the economy than was seen in Britain in 2011 or 2012 (though not both combined). What’s important to note is that, despite Obama’s recent token effort to get congress to repeal or further delay sequestration, which accounts for $78 billion of the $304 billion in spending cuts and tax increases planned for this year, all of this is his fault and his fault alone. Continue reading “The Obama Austerity Package”
A Stark Response
Recently I made an argument that the minimum wage should rise. In that argument, I sought to refute some of the things fellow blogger Rick Stark said to the contrary. Stark has done me the great honour of a thorough two part response. It demands answer–either I must concede his expanded, larger argument, or I must explain where I differ with it. Having read both posts in their entirety, I find myself still unconvinced. Here’s why.
Plight Flight: Austerity’s Unintended Demographic Disaster
The austerity policies racking the economies of the European Union have had an interesting negative externality–they have put to flight vast swathes of the populations of entire countries. The sheer scale of the flight, as I will shortly show below, is on par with the kind of mass exoduses normally associated with the wars Europe has tried to forget, and will have devastating long-term consequences for European prosperity and growth.
Continue reading “Plight Flight: Austerity’s Unintended Demographic Disaster”
Benjamin Studebaker 