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The study of choice, scarcity, Social reactions to policies, and unseen consequences. Since our time is limited, and creating/distributing goods/services takes time, everything is finite and has some scarcity. Economics is looking at that value, scarcity and demand -- and how individuals or society reacts with policies. And what the consequences of those policies are. ℹ️ Info           ~ Aristotle Sabouni Created: 2018-12-10

Title	Summary
1990 Yacht Tax	Democrats in Congress passed a "fair share" luxury tax (30%) on airplanes, cars and yachts (as part of an Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990), and promised it would bring in $9B over the next 5 years. What actually happened is it killed industries, lost thousands of jobs, and net taxes raised were negative.
40 Hour work week	The left thinks the Unions/Government gave us the 40 hour work week. It was standardized a decade before by Henry Ford (Capitalism). By the time we had the FSRA, it applied to less than 20% of the population. The Government created a regulation for the very few remaining, and took credit for something that was already done, and leftist media repeated the lie and the non-skeptical gobbled it up.
Alt-Economics	These are alternate-reality economics that Fake Economists (usually leftist polemics) tell each other and their base. AKA Leftonomics. Never blame on malice that which is more easily explained by incompetence. But when you are an "expert" that knows the facts and repeat the fabrications anyways? Then malice (dishonesty) is all that's left. They know better.
Bay Bridge Boondoggle	The bay bridge is a metaphor for San Francisco. The Golden Gate was built privately and under budget for $35M ($1.2B in today's dollars), one span of the Bay Bridge needed a retrofit. It was run by the city and came in late, and over budget at $6.4B, has metallurgy issues. All show, but we could have built 4 other bridges for the price.
Benefits encourage unemployement	Is anyone surprised that paying people not to work, encourages more people to not work? Well, as soon as a conservative suggested it in 2020 (not to raise unemployment too much), far left News organizations all pearl clutched over the offensive premise of cause and effect. So Democrats did it, and they got the exact effect the reasonable had warned.
Big Fraud Theory	There are a few books or movies like "The Big Short", Liar's Poker, who float this Big-Fraud theory (BFT): that the 2008 Financial Crisis was because of Fraud. It is loved by Hollywood, the Media, Progressives (Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders), who know better but want to distract and enrage the gullible. It's becoming the most widely spread theory because simply hate and ignorance spread faster than information, complexity, and introspection.
The Broken Window Fallacy	This is a fundamental concept of economics (and logic) about seen advantages versus unseen costs. Henry Hazlitt summed up the art of economics as not merely looking at the immediate consequences but the longer effects of any act or policy, and tracing those consequences not merely for one group but for all groups. In other words, break a window and the glazer might win -- but the shopkeeper and customers did not.
CRA, Fannie-Freddie Theory (CRAFFT)	CRA->Fannie/Freddie theory (CRAFFT) is that CRA requiring high risk loans, and Fannie/Freddie buying them up and bundling them (GST's) let politicians get loans to poorer people with nothing down. But when real estate started going down, they all walked. With all the defaults, banks were getting credit squeezed by regulations, so couldn't loan, and the credit market froze.
Capital in the 21st Century	Economists can't agree on anything, but one thing that 80% of economists do agree on: that Piketty's r>g and is the cause of rising income inequality, is just wrong.
Capitalism	America and freedom are founded on Capitalism; the idea that you can own property (the means of production). Ultimately, if someone can steal from you, then you are a slave. If you can't start a business, or run it how you want? Then you're not a freeman, you're a serf to the state. Marxism is serfdom. The left wants everyone to be beholden to Uncle Government and Party.
Cell Phones	A good example of government helping is what the FCC did for cell phones: it delayed them by 40 years. In 1945 the Saturday Evening Post was talking about handle-talkies, which could have been done with transistor radios of the time. But while the technology was known for how to do it, as well as business plans and motivation, it took until 1982 for the FCC to allocate the spectrum to do it, and another 7 years (1989) to authorize licensing the service.
Costs of Defensive Medicine	There are often unexpected consequences for everything we do. I had a minor epiphany for improving a medical device/process, that heads my company (Baxter) agreed would save lives... but they could never use it because of medical liability. When they say, "Defensive medicine"... it is about protecting the company from lawsuits, thanks to overlitigation.
Dispersed Knowledge	In the battle between Keynes and Hayek, history has shows Keynes wrong and Hayek the winner. Keynes models broke with Stagflation, Post WWII economy, Japans Lost Decades, China and Russian growth by privatizing. Hayek won the noble prize for explaining why: Dispersed Knowledge. Leaders don't know more than everyone else combined, then the more decisions you make from the top, the less efficient those decisions will be.
Does minimum wage impact employment?	The problem is that minimum wage doesn't always immediately cause noticable unemployment (some exceptions). But as soon as you look deeper you find it suppresses growth, increases a decline. Sometimes people reacted knowing the increase was coming. It hits certain segments harder than others (teens, starting out, part time work, and so on).
Dotcom Bubble	People on both sides of the dot-com bubble can be wrong at the same time. The Internet IS changing the global economy, and this IS NOT just a "flash-in-the-pan" fad that's going to be gone tomorrow. But the other side is that investors CAN overreact to hype, get way ahead of returns, and that can cause a big pullback. But in the long term, this is the new normal.
ESG	ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) is like the CCP's Social Media Score, as a way to bully companies and individuals into agendas the elites want. Basically, they want to replace Shareholder Equity with "Stakeholder" Equity. This is the idea that you replace quality and price, with whatever metrics the far left wants, like Environmental, or SJW suppliers.
Econ101	Econ101 (Economics-101) is just a play on the things that people used to learn in College on the first day. Used to, because they don't really teach the basics any more, and they dupe many students in economics by obstructing history and common sense, and replacing it with Keynesian tripe and Marxist dogma. But this is the basics of what people should know if they really want to talk about economics.
Economic Allegories	There are stories about economics, with a hidden or obvious meaning. I've noticed the meaning (or reception of the lesson) is dependent on the open-mindedness of the listener, as sometimes the lessons are about what is, not what some wish it was. But alas, the laws of economics are like the laws of nature: they don't care about your feelings.
Economic Crisis	Rahm Emanuel re-popularized the saying, "Never let a good crisis go to waste", he was talking about how to deceive people for your political ends. And that was taken to heart in reference to what happened around the economic crisis of 2007. This section debunks a lot of what did and didn't happen.
Economics of lies, and fidelity	Increase the economic value of a cheat or lie, and you'll use them less often. Thus permission to do something once (or infrequently) will reduce the likelihood of you doing it, more than the impossible standard of pure abstinence.
Economics/All
Financial Terms	These are a bunch of financial terms (concepts really), that you can scan to get familiar with the jargon and ideas. Especially before reading the Financial crisis of 2007-2008, but they're good jargon to know when watching financial shows or reading financial press.
Financial crisis of 2007-2008	The left's view of the financial crisis misses on everything from how over-regulated we were, to the causes of the criss, to what happened during it, or why we pulled out. They can't tell you how removing Glass-Steagall or derivatives caused the crash, or why it never happened anywhere else that didn't have Glass Steagall. But if the facts don't fit your narrative, just lie louder, and attack any sources that question you.
Gender Wage Gap	This one is many myths (lies) in one: (a) Women get $.77-.82 cents on the dollar compared to what men make (this injustice is called the "Gender wage/pay gap" or GWG) (b) We need big government (politicians) and new laws/regulations/taxes to fix it (c) Democrat politicians motives are all sincere, anyone that opposes is a sexist/misogynistic/bigot. All false, and debunked here.
Gini Coefficient	The Gini Coefficient came about when Corrado Gini wrote the book on Fascism. He said that income should be evenly distributed, and if it wasn’t, the imbalance is an excuse to seize and redistribute wealth and liberty to make things “more fair”. His coefficient is basically just that: a measure of how economically fascists (socialist) your country is.
Glass-Steagall	Glass-Steagall was the 1930's new deal regulation that said Commercial and Investment banks had to be separated. There would be no "universal" banks (that did both). In theory, by separating sides there would be more transparency, and people might behave less risky. In truth, there's just more inefficiency and the same risk.
Goldilocks and 3 wages	Minimum wage is like Goldilocks, there are three ways you can set minimum wage: too low, too high, and just right. Too low, means it's doing nothing of value. Too high means it's hurting employment and growth. And since just right can never apply to two different people, places or moments in time, there's really only one way to set minimum wage: and that's at the wrong level.
Government spending	I'm not arguing government spending never produces anything good. In theory, they can invest in infrastructure and that will benefit the economy in the long term. Hoover dam meant cheap power, and helped enable Vegas and L.A. However, for each Hoover dam, there are dozens of government spending disasters. When averaged, you get far more downs than ups for your economy because: politics.
IPencil	The podcast on i pencil is an economics treatise by Lawrence W. Reed, founder of fee.org (circa 1958), explaining the complexity of making something as simple as a pencil in the modern world. (No one person knows it all, thus no one person/committee can optimize it). I’d heard parts of this, was very familiar with fee.org, so read I pencil in it’s entirety. It’s definitely worth a listen and/or read.
Income Disperity	What I'm talking about here is not some great group injustices, but knowing that if you help enough individuals, you help the groups they belong to. Far more than those who divide us based on intersectional victimhood groups. Focus on the Micro, and you'll fix the macro.
Income inequality	The left pretends that we're getting poorer by ignoring that our Real GDP has doubled. Our grandparents didn't have cellphones, gene-therapy for cancer, had one car, 3 generations lived in 900 sq. ft. homes, they didn't take as many vacations, the rest of the war wrecked globe wasn't competing with us (yet), and social programs and taxes/regulations hadn't driven up the costs of everything.
Inflation	When the truth doesn't support your cause, distort the truth. That's what the BLS did by changing how inflation is calculated. We used to just peg Cost of Living to what it took to buy the average amount of goods and services, and then track that year over year. Then BLS started adjusting and using fudge factors, so things don't look as bad as they are.
Keynes	While his micro-economic theories worked, he had all of his Macro-economic theories that we could tax ourselves into prosperity proven wrong by history, and explained why by Hayek. Staglation (1970s) couldn't happen in his models. The left still believes that Keynesianism works. Real economists do not.
Keynes and the 2 day work week	Keynes said in 1930 that our grandkids would work 2 days a week and have a 5 day weekend. This is a typical flaw in thinking of the brightest minds on the left: (a) that people don't value work/being productive or get rewards from it (b) that people given more cash won't want to spend it on things and earn still more (some will trade more income for more free time: while others will not).
Keynesian failures	It would be great if Keynesianism worked. But history shows it has failed every time it has been tried. Examples: the new deal, the new new deal, post WWII boom (cutting military should have caused depression), 1970's Stagflation broke the models, Japan's lost decades (Abenomics), every Communist economy that failed, every one that opened up and grew (N. Korea, Russia, China, Vietnam). All went the opposite of Keynes predictions.
Keynesianism	Keynes microeconomics was brilliant, his macroeconomics have never worked in the real world. It failed in Japan, Venezuela, China, Russia, North Korea, U.S. in every administration since WWII. Stopping it succeeded in China, Russia, and every country that gave up communism.
Paul Krugman	No one in the economic press is as consistently wrong as he is. There are economics sites dedicated to debunking and mocking him. He even times his flip-flops to be stay wrong when situations change.
Laffer Curve	This is the brain-dead obvious idea that taxes have limits. At some point, if you tax people too much then more people stop working. E.g. there are unintended consequences. Since it's obviously true, with dozens of real-world examples, many Democrats will claim it's been disproven or false. The only thing in displute is that it shifts due to time/situations/individual values.
Links-Economics	Links to articles on Economics that I found interesting.
Livable Wage	Progressives often see the choice as: (a) A livable minimum wage (b) A lower minimum wage... But the reality is: (a) What the market will bear (b) Unemployment ($0/hour). So the choice isn't pulling people out of poverty or not, it's what value an opportunity is worth to an employer, before they automate, outsource, or just give up (skip the job) -- and the person is unemployed.
Memes/Econ/Economics	These Memes are just about Economics.
Memes/Econ/Keynes
Memes/People/Bernie	Bernienomics is like Santa Claus meets Joseph Stalin, what's yours is ours, and what's ours is mine.
Memes/People/Krugman	Mock-worthy Keynesian fake-economist that works for the propaganda arm of the NYT.
Milton Friedman goes to China	There’s a famous economics fable of Milton Friedman going to China (or India), and discovers them using men with shovels instead of earth moverrs to make a canal. When asked, they say it's to create jobs. Milton suggest using spoons instead. The point of the allegory is to show that less productivity is economic waste, and that politicians don't get economics.
Minimum Wage	Minimum wage is the delusion that bureaucrats and politicos know more about what's fair than the laborer and the employer, and that there's a magic round number that fair for everyone, everywhere, at the same time. It hurts employment, increases automation and offshoring, and drives up prices. But other than that...
Minimum Wage Laws	The minimum wage and living wage warriors seem reluctant to accept the economic realities: price and wage controls never work. There are extremely rare cases where they can work (or do minimal damage) in one small location for short amounts of time, but there's no magic wage that's right for everywhere and everywhen at once. Thus wage controls start out bad and get worse over time.
Minimum Wage and Automation	Value (Money) is derived from the product of work (productivity/results), not based on what you paid for it. Thus the less you pay, the better off you are. Despite Social Justice Warriors (also known as economically illiterates) will tell you, minimum wage is not good, you can't lose more money on every transaction and make it up in volume.
Minimum Wage: Cost basis	I hear all the time, that McDonald’s can afford to pay a “livable wage” without raising costs, or "it’s just a few cents a burger", by people that don’t understand basic economics, or business. Doing the math? The avg McD's sees ≈$150K in profits, and this would rause costs by ≈$250K, putting them in the red by $100K. They will pass that $4.50/order on to customers.
Minimum Wage: Poverty	Poverty and who makes minimum wage is complex: 75% of it is due to underemployment (which is more insidious than unemployment), Most poverty is short term (<1 year), Most of the rest is due to under-education, immigration, fatherless families, and social program programs that hold people down. Explain how raising minimum wage helps with those things.
Modern Monetary Theory	A leftist/Marxist anti-Economic theory claims governments can print as much money as they want or run infinite debt. There's no correlation between money supply or debt ratios since they own a monopoly on money. This is all smoke and mirrors used by leftists to collapse economies, but spend cash and collapse the economy as a way to get control (Marxism).
New Jersey and the Economist	The Economist ran an oft quoted FakeNews story that blue states subsidize red states (via taxes/benefits). They did it by ignoring borrowing, compliance costs, and other inefficiencies. What it really showed is that if you spend $2.63 (in taxes, debt, etc) you get $.60 in purchasing power back, and some will see the $.60 (ignore what it cost) and think they're coming out ahead.
New Keynesian	Keynes microeconomic models work. His macroeconomic model of models, didn't. Stagflation proved it. Instead of rethinking their premise, the Keynsians just made New Keynesian models, so they could stick with their discredited religion. Keynesians today are really New Keynesians, all the stubborn wrong-headedness, with new models that still don't work.
Numbers Covered by Obamacare	Those claiming 20 million more people are insured because of Obamacare (ACA) either don’t know what they’re talking about, or are bald-faced liars. We're around 29 million people short of the campaign promise for universal coverage. And it's well below the 20 million new people covered that the fools and frauds like to claim. The facts: about 2.8M were covered because of Obamacare, and another 4-6M because of medicaid expansion, at a cost of about $20K per new person covered.
Obama's gun truths and consequences	From Gun Sales to Mass Shootings, how the unintended consequences of community organizing are often detrimental to the stated goal. How divisive rhetoric and drawing attention to your cause can often get the opposite outcome of intent. Of course if your intent is to pose for the selfie-stick and drive up gun ownership and mass shootings then maybe it isn't the opposite of intent.
Obamanomics v Trumponomics	Big government spending, tax and regulations are burdens on business and scare them away from growth: that's why Obamanomics failed so miserably. While the converse is true for Trumponomics: despite more international threats and instability, the markets were bolder. People anticipate future risks, and higher taxes/regulations require more caution than one with more opportunitities.
Prop D	This is a vacancy tax that penalizes landlords for the inability to find tenants for their storefronts after the city has made it harder to find tenants for their storefronts. If you want to know why businesses flee the state, and why the rest of the nation thinks that SF is a city of fascist morons, look no further than the Prop D.
Rent Control	Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck said, "rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city – except for bombing". He was understating it. Like other price/wage controls, you can control the prices, but not the unintended consequences of controlling the prices. It makes things worse, virtually everywhere it has been tried. Help the few: hurt the many.
Saez-Piketty lies of omission	People adapt to tax policies, so many chose benefits that get taken out before income, instead of raises which get reported as income: so bigger pensions, 401K’s, Student Savings, Healthcare benefits, vacation/flex time, and so on — those have value (income), but aren’t accounted for in IRS data. Those that don't adjust for that, are economic charlatans.
Scandinavian Miracle	There's an idea called the Scandinavian Miracle: that they upped their Social Programs and it had no impacts on their economy or culture. If you believe in Miracles, you're a rube. Everything comes with tradeoffs. And the Northern European countries are no exception. They paid a steep price, have learned, and have been backing away from that "utopia".
Slavery didn't make anyone rich	There's a fallacy amongst the left that Slavery made the South or America rich, or "America got rich on the backs of slaves". This is debated between fake economists (leftist theologians) and real economists, with most of the real ones recognizing that slavery was not a huge economic win, and was most likely a net burden.
Suffocating Liberty - the cost of red tape	Each new tax, law or regulation, comes with costs (compliance, non-compliance, enforcement and punishment). We have 174,545 pages of regulations, 73,954 pages in our tax code, 23,000 page in our federal legal code, double that for statutes, 300,000 criminal punishments from administrative agencies. Then add in the state+local laws, regulations and taxes on top.
TARP	Troubled Asset Relief Program: this was Government forcing Banks to take money, so they could comply with government regulations to make loans. All to get around a crisis that government (mostly Democrats) created. Then Democrats blamed the banks for taking the money, and used it as an excuse to put more regulations on the banks.
Tax Policy	Democrats keep using Tax Policy wrong. Instead of using it to generate revenues, they try to instill social justice. Punish the "bad people" and reward the Good. That's pretty fucked up right there -- because by their own idea, they're punishing success and rewarding sloth/failure. You get what you incentivize. Then they wail when you point that out.
Tesla/India obstructing automakers	India's response to Tesla is a great lesson in leftist economics (or anti-economics). They think they're winning by failing to compare the seen benefits to the unseen costs. (The latter being the point of economics). They put up barriers to sales/innovation (protectionism), and it only protects them from the growth and opportunities they would have had.
Think like a Freak	A lot of it is confirmation bias: I already think like a freak (much of the time), so most of their stories were snippets of things I'd read, or ways that I try to approach problems, or ways I like to think. But I still enjoy it, and there's always a few tidbits of new in there.
Thomas Piketty	The woman-beating Pikkety, wrote a NYT best seller for a fictional depiction of economics, based on bad research by Emmanuel Saez. His Socialist Manifesto was called "Capital... in the Twenty First Century" is a play of Karl Marx's Das Kapital, and like Marx has been completely debunked in peer review. But the far left prefers confirmation bias to the truth, so they believe it anyways.
Treasury View	"government spending crowds out private investment", is widely accepted as at least partly true. Keynesians want perfect efficiency, and thus bubbles and bursts are examples of inefficiency, and an opportunity for government to step in and spend (stimulate/destimuate) to where politicians think perfection should have been. However, once a program starts, it will soon crowd out private investment, and prove the Treasury view correct.
Trickle Down Economics	Cutting taxes gives people more money to spend. Unless you literally burn cash, the only things you can do with money is give it away, spend it, or save/invest it: and all stimulate the economy (create jobs/growth).(Saving is passive investing). Thus only debate is the best way to stimulate the economy. Nobody informed and honest will deny that trickle down works. If they argue it doesn't, they discredit themselves.
Trumponomics	FakeNews was spinning how the bull market had nothing to do with Trump's policies, which is as dumb as giving him all the credit. Presidents can either (a) create headwinds (raise taxes, regulations, energy costs) (b) put tailwinds (decrease taxes, regulations, and lower energy costs through encouraging drilling/pipelines). That can be swamped by other factors, but they have SOME influence on markets.
Universal Basic Income	Links to more on Universal Basic Income. If you pay people not to work, it turns out you get more to not work. Or in other words, you get what you incentivize.
Why can't Keynesianism work?	The idea is that during recessions markets overreact to fear and government spending can offset that loss. It asssumes (1) an information vacuum (2) we know where spending should be (3) they will cut spending into the recovery (4) they're replacing like jobs (5) equal efficiency between public and private sector. None of those things is true, so Keynesian promises have never been realized.
Zero Sum and the Government	A progressive said my problem was that I saw government as a zero sum game: where every dollar you used to help one person, came from the pocket of someone else. I explained it is worse. Government adds overhead, waste, fraud, work rules, politics, and other things that kill efficiency, freedom, pride and value, as part of the transaction. Thus it is a negative-sum (lose-lose) game.

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👁️ See also

• Economics - The study of choice, scarcity, Social reactions to policies, and unseen consequences.

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