The Failures of the Market

Wind and solar can’t even produce enough energy to manufacture the hardware they are made from. They are a parasite on the larger economy, making a few people wealthy at everyone’s expense. They are wealth-destroying technologies. --Patrick Moore

Another dull Steeler game. The way Rudolph throws, they should draft nothing but power forwards as wideouts. Everything was a jump ball except the open guys who were overthrown. It may not be the Steelers, it may be the game itself.
Joe Flacco has a herniated disk in his neck that puts his season and possibly his career in jeopardy and leaves Denver’s dysfunctional offense in the hands of a trio of quarterbacks who have never taken a regular-season snap in the NFL.

Under Mayor Bill de Blasio's "Special One-Time Assistance Program," (SOTA) local homeless families are given a full year's worth of rent - which has cost NYC taxpayers $89 million on rent alone since August 2017 - before exporting some 5,074 homeless families (12,482 individuals) to cities as far as the South Pacific, according to the New York Post, citing data from the Department of Homeless Services (DHS).

"The city also paid travel expenses, through a separate taxpayer-funded program called Project Reconnect, but would not divulge how much it spent. A Friday flight to Honolulu for four people would cost about $1,400. A bus ticket to Salt Lake City, Utah, for the same family would cost $800.

Add to the tab the cost of furnishings, which the city also did not disclose. One SOTA recipient said she received $1,000 for them.

DHS defends the stratospheric costs, saying it actually saves the city on shelter funding — which amounts to about $41,000 annually per family, as compared to the average yearly rent of $17,563 to house families elsewhere." -New York Post

As retail sales continue to slow, stores like Nordstrom, Crate & Barrel and Tiffany & Co. are investing in eateries to give shoppers a new reason to come through their doors. (wsj)

...contrary to what American progressives believe, most wealth isn't devoted to extravagant consumption. Instead, it's invested in companies; it's used to fund research and development that will create better goods and services for consumers; it serves as the capital that innovators and producers borrow from banks to grow their businesses. In other words, most wealth is used to fuel other wealth-producing activities that improve well-being.
So whether a wealth tax will create a real disincentive to accumulate capital or force rich taxpayers to send a larger share of their money to the IRS, less capital will be available for everyone in the economy to use for their own businesses and training. That means that many Americans beyond the super-wealthy will get burned by the tax.
So whether a wealth tax will create a real disincentive to accumulate capital or force rich taxpayers to send a larger share of their money to the IRS, less capital will be available for everyone in the economy to use for their own businesses and training. That means that many Americans beyond the super-wealthy will get burned by the tax.--deRugy
The basic problem is, is a society better off with politicians doing the spending?

Killer smog hovered over Donora, Pennsylvania, on October 29, 1948. Over a five-day period, the smog killed about 20 people and made thousands more seriously ill.

          The Failures of the Market

Ebeling has an article on the Collectivists' assessment of the failures of the free market. These failures are seen without the context of the modern world's remarkable successes, the incredible advances in health, life expectancy, comfort, and diversion. And, if one is allowed to see it as an advantage, freedom. That said, it is an adequate summary of opinions that are usually presented in a disjointed--and emotional--manner. Adequate, but subjective, utopian and not very convincing. And, of course, it never considers the alternatives.

"First, the financial crisis of 2008-2009, claimed to have been caused by unregulated financial markets that produced an artificial housing market that then collapsed, leaving many in financially desperate circumstances, from which many of those have still not fully recovered, a decade after the banking debacle was set in motion. 

Second, this is closely connected to another of capitalism’s sins, the persistence and worsening of income and social inequality, that carries with it various forms of societal injustice. Basically, it is asserted that the richest have been getting richer, while the vast majority in society languishes in either stagnation or falling economic circumstances. 

Third, and closely tied to that second accusation, is the claim that free-market liberal societies create and cannot operate successfully without sexist and racial bigotry and discrimination. The presumption is that a capitalist system, based on exploitation of others in general, always ends up particularly oppressing and abusing “people of color” and the one half of the human population still generally called “women.”

Fourth, profit-guided market economies pursue methods of production that have caused the global warming cataclysm said to be hanging over the world, and having caused it, self-interested greedy ways of making millions offers no solution to the global environmental problems in general. 

Fifth, it is said that free-market liberalism is an inherently elitist social and political system because it is the narrow number of people who own the methods of production and therefore control the means of earning a living, who use their political power to thwart the majoritarian well of the “the people” to control their lives through government regulation and planning of humankind’s economic and social affairs through a truly democratic system free from the control of the “one percent.” 

And, sixth, liberal market society is based on a mythical and false notion of individualism and personal freedom that denies and tries to destroy the ethnic and cultural communitarianism that reflects the real social needs of people as collective wholes, and which give people a sense of identity, belonging, and security for which they are longing."