Michael Munger
Playing Chicken with a Stack of Steering Wheels
“People often complain about the ‘irrationality’ of politics, but there is nothing irrational about the process that has given rise to our crushing debt burden. Voters really do want lower deficits, provided it does not involve either cutting spending or raising taxes.” ~ Michael Munger
Why Intellectuals Hate Al Czervik
“Power, by which I mean political power, is always zero-sum: if the intellectual elite has it, you and I don’t have it.” ~ Michael Munger
All Housing is Still Affordable Housing: “Seen and Unseen” Edition
“The unseen cause of gentrification is the knee-jerk NIMBYism of affluent leftist neighborhood associations. And that causes the elimination of almost all affordable housing in the city, quickly.” ~ Michael Munger
You Use the Roads, Don’t You?
“Having resources taken from you against your will, and then accepting the return of some of those resources, in the form of a monopoly road system, does not make you a free rider.” ~ Michael C. Munger
An Approach to Teaching Rawls And Income Inequality
“Far from representing an outcome chosen behind the veil of ignorance, political pressures will always be driven by full knowledge of the benefits realized by self-interested actors, even if they mouth formulaic invocations of ‘social justice’ while they do it.” ~ Michael C. Munger
Job Gentrification: Three Questions as a Way of Teaching About Minimum Wages
“If you force much higher wages — and a ‘living wage’ of $15/hour for an entry-level job in fast food is much higher — then you will ‘gentrify” jobs.’ ~ Michael C. Munger
What Are We For? A Challenge for Classical Liberals in the Academy
“The solution, the way to navigate the rapids downstream of where we are now, is clear, but not easy. It is to refocus on making the moral case for capitalism, on providing a positive, optimistic vision of the world that can be remade.” ~ Michael C. Munger
Manners, the Coase Theorem, and a Park Bench in London
“There are some situations, though, where no one knows who has the initial property right assignment. Under those circumstances, the negotiation is more free form, but the best outcome still depends on how much the parties involved value the alternatives.” ~ Michael C. Munger
Dismal is Better
“Today the social isolation of the economically minded has different proximate causes, but the underlying reason economic reasoning stands alone is that it stands athwart the desire of many people, perhaps most people, to rearrange the actual world into a world that they can imagine.” ~ Michael C. Munger
Is it a LOLR? No, It’s a Trap
“The reason this is infuriating is that we are being told that taxpayers should be willing to double down, to reimburse even-more-careless depositors for their negligent inattention to risk.” ~ Michael C. Munger
