Mercatus Center

In parts nine and ten of this essay series, I used this basic accounting identity to think about property taxes as a way for the state to be a sort of silent partner in the ownership of residential property and to claim monopoly profits as taxes: Net rental value after maintenance and expenses = Rate of return on investment × Price Where housing is politically constrained so that property values are inflated, property taxes can be a relatively pure claim of monopoly profits.  So, one could...

The monthly BLS jobs report released today was one more piece of good news in a long trend—the longest ever—of uplifting labor market statistics. The breakneck jobs growth of 2018 (with 225,000 jobs added per month on average) has slowed to a more moderate pace in 2019 (165,000 jobs added per month on average so far), but is still rising about twice as fast as needed to simply satisfy population growth. Employers added 164,000 jobs in July, with most of the growth occurring in education and...

The Last All-Male Board on the S&P 500 Is No Longer Vanessa Fuhrmans | The Wall Street Journal | Tweeted by Jennifer Huddleston Facing pressure from shareholders and state governments, companies have begun adding females to their boards of directors. In 2012, one in eight S&P 500 boards was all-male. The Soviet Space Program Was Not Woke Marina Koren | The Atlantic | Tweeted by Robert Graboyes While the Soviet Union “won the space race for equality,” their intentions were more...

The Hayek Program Podcast includes audio from lectures, interviews, and discussions of scholars and visitors from the F. A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Subscribe to the Hayek Program Podcast Soundcloud | iTunes | Stitcher | Google Play

Tyler Cowen writes on the need to both increase immigration to the U.S. and have a citizenship question on the 2020 Census. Read it at Bloomberg.

Matthew Mitchell writes on the harm done to the image of capitalism by business leaders who seek corporate welfare. Read it at Reason.

Addiction is a serious matter that deserves serious attention and treatment. It also deserves serious care: public officials should not too casually throw around the term to capitalize on moral panics about disfavored media technologies. Nor should they abuse this language to propose far-reaching, liberty-reducing measures. Unfortunately, this seems to be the case with Senator Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) newly introduced “Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology (SMART) Act,” which would prohibit...

Addiction is a serious matter that deserves serious attention and treatment. It also deserves serious care: public officials should not too casually throw around the term to capitalize on moral panics about disfavored media technologies. Nor should they abuse this language to propose far-reaching, liberty-reducing measures. Unfortunately, this seems to be the case with Senator Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) newly introduced “Social Media Addiction Reduction Technology (SMART) Act,” which would prohibit...

A few weeks ago, Equifax settled with federal and state regulators to pay up to $700 million in damages and penalties from the 2017 data breach involving the personal information of millions of Americans. This is far from the only time data security and privacy have been in the news. Just this week, Capital One announced a major breach that exposed the data of 106 million customers and applicants. From privacy for social media and search to security for government organization and...

Jennifer Huddleston appears on Montana Talks to discuss data privacy.