SUPPLY SIDE LIBERALISM: THE INTERESTING CASE OF DR. KIMBALL AND MR. MILES

I mentioned in a previous blog-post my reluctance to Prof. Miles Kimball's idea that negative interest rates would get us out of our present-day doldrums.

But, as I said at the time, I also think Prof. Miles Kimball approach to economics is extremely interesting because he mixes Supply-side tools and approach or philosophy with classically 'progressive' objectives.

The Top 100 Sites for Enlightened Economists has the following to say: "This unique blog by a University of Michigan economics professor applies market-driven and supply-side ideas to issues normally dominated by liberal activists. The result is a fascinating and well-written site that will challenge the assumptions of nearly any reader".

Prof Kimball describes himself in the following terms: 

RECENT HISTORY OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT

This is another blog-post bouncing off of a Marginal Revolution's article - that one about the alternation of the Right and the Left in producing the freshest, most interesting economic ideas.

Kevin Drum, blogging at Mother Jones, answers one of Prof. Cowen's concerns about the supposed lack of interesting stuff on the Left since 2009 and their spending time arguing against dangerous Republican economic dogmas by pointing out that fighting dangerous dogmas might not be glamorous or ground-breaking but it is still a necessity and a public good.

But I was personally more interested in the sketch of economic thought Prof. Tyler Cowen proposes.

QUICK POST ON MATT YGLESIAS'S DEFENCE OF THE FOODIES

This is a quick reaction to Matt Yglesias blogpost about 'underground dinner parties'... The original article that lead to Mr. Yglesias's post is here.

And he concludes: Food service is one of those weird areas where the exact same thing (cooking food for other people) is done on both a commercial and non-commercial basis, except with totally different regulatory schemes. The moral of the story here should almost certainly be that we're over-regulating commercial food production, not that we need to clamp down on underground dinner parties.

This is, I suspect, a libertarian inclination gone wrong. We can trust in a private chef, not being paid for his work, to NOT poison his friends, colleagues, buddies or contacts.

We canNOT make the same assumption about a chef or restaurant owner who is trying to make a living off feeding other people. Here, with a profit motive involved, there is a clear tension between public safety and the food quality & cost. If a for-profit chef can get away with using unsafe (and thus cheap) ingredients, he will.

The interest of the chef and the consuming public aren't nearly so strongly misaligned in the case of private parties...

Never ever trust anyone once money's involved.

SUPPLY SIDE LIBERALISM: WHY I DON'T LIKE MILES KIMBALL'S PROPOSAL ON E-MONEY

Listening to or reading only people you know you pretty much agree with on everything is unlikely to lead to much original thinking so I endeavour to read economists who might be called 'conservative' or with whom I might disagree on various topics.

One such economist is Miles Kimball. He writes for various outfits, most notably Quartz and his blog, Confessions of a Supply-side Liberal, is extremely interesting. As he himself puts it, "In calling myself a supply-sider I am saying that I believe the harm to the productive performance of the economy caused by taxes and regulations is serious (though seldom serious enough that a reduction in taxes would raise revenue).  In calling myself a liberal, I am saying that in addition to an attachment to the liberty, limited government, constitutionalism, and rule of law emphasized by Classical Liberalism,  I hold to a view based on both classic Utilitarianism and contested elements of modern economic theory that, generally speaking, a dollar is much more valuable to a poor person than to a rich person, and that therefore, there is a serious benefit to redistribution that must be weighed against the serious distortions caused by the usual methods of redistribution".