Note that in the letter I resisted pointing out the hilarity of having the CEOs of two companies that each received billions of dollars in government bailout funds holding forth on how to make America more “competitive.”

Not all government spending is created equal, for Keynesian purposes or otherwise. There is plenty of spending we could cut without creating a Keynesian disaster, even if you accept the Keynesian framework straight up.

The basis for this failure was the erroneous belief that “efficient markets formed by people holding rational expectations could explain virtually all economic activity.” That thesis has now been thoroughly discredited. It is still taught in colleges and business schools, which is why I find most MBAs not worth hiring. Frequently, they can be worse than clueless — they are steeped in the bad ideas of long dead economists, and in my profession, that is not a formula for making money.

Today, according to the statistics people look at, even with California’s bountiful resources, the most equitable climate in the entire continent, and with every blessing that God could bestow upon a land, people are finding a better place to live and work and raise their families out in the desolation of the Arizona and Nevada deserts. No conceivable act of God could ever wreak such devastation upon our state. It takes a government to do that.

This slow abdication of legislative responsibility on the part of Congress started many decades ago, and is no simple matter to fix. As a general principle members of Congress ought to refuse to vote for statutes that delegate large amounts of the real lawmaking to another branch. If the health care law’s perverse consequences (such as the possibility that, without a waiver, McDonald’s would have had to drop health insurance for all its employees) were laid at the feet of Congress, then Congress would write laws more carefully, or move more quickly to amend them as they should. In one word, is this not a good occasion for Congress to assume more responsibility for its actions?

The bulb ban makes sense only one of two ways: either as an expression of cultural sanctimony, with a little technophilia thrown in for added glamour, or as a roundabout way to transfer wealth from the general public to the few businesses with the know-how to produce the light bulbs consumers don’t really want to buy.
Or, of course, as both.

There is no question recycling is valuable, but like anything else, it’s best left to the market to coordinate.

Since about April 2010, however, the Beveridge Curve shows something strange. The number of jobs openings is unusually high, but so is the unemployment rate. To many economists, this indicates a structural mismatch. The skills possessed by today’s workers aren’t the ones being sought by employers.