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07/29/2005 Archived Entry: "Gordon P. reviews three sites"

Gordon P. offers today's overview of three sites that are likely to interest McBlog visitors: Claire Wolfe's blog, Lynne Kiesling's The Knowledge Problem, and the Environmental Economics Blog. Click on 'more' to continue....

Gordon writes, Claire Wolfe makes some interesting observations about media bias and arrogance, and the apparent fact that, to the media, only "People Just Like Us" (i.e., blond-haired people of european descent) "matter" or have any significance in world affairs, and that everyone else is just a "walk-on extra" --- even in their own country.

Lynne Kiesling observes that the "Energy Bill" is really just a "Farm Bill" in disguise, and makes some interesting general comments on the nature of "Rent-Seeking Behavior," i.e., the tendency for politically well-connected but generally unproductive persons or entities to attempt to corrupt government officials into extorting tax monies from individuals or producers for the use or production of some resource, and transfer some or all of those monies to the well-connected but unproductive individuals or entities.

She also makes a second plug for the "Environmental Economics" blog, which at least _attempts_ to bring economic insights to bear on environmental issues. My objection to this site is that its authors often take a "Coasean" position, which implicitly assumes the false axiom that a "social utility function" exists and that a legitimate role of government is to "maximize" this non-existent social utility, and argues that "in the absence of transaction costs," any and every arbitrary allocation of property rights is "equally efficient," because the assignees will immediate bargain amongst themselves "to correct any externalities." Coase therefore concludes that gov'ts should allocate resources by arbitrarily _assigning_ a (possibly artificial) "property right" to any "un-owned" resource (be it tangible or intangible) to whichever individual or entity that gov't officials believe will assign the "greatest utility" to that resource, and then allow these individuals or entities to trade or sell the newly-assigned (and possibly artificial) "properties" to whomever else might want them more.

Despite the fact that Coase flat-out _ignores_ the fundamental characteristics that make something capable of _being_ property (such as tangibility, the impossibility of simultaneous use by more than one person, or the role of "development" or "homesteading" in establishing an initial right to an un-owned or abandoned resource), and instead falsely assumes that property rights can be arbitrarily "assigned" by gov't fiat and that "all transaction costs are zero," Coase nevertheless won the Nobel Prize and the Bank of Sweden Prize for his dubious arguments based on false premises, and his papers are the basis for most "modern" analyses of gov't regulation through the by-fiat establishment of false "markets," such as a "market" in "pollution credits:"