King for a Day, Reconsidered

A couple of weeks ago, I critiqued a number of David’s pieces on the topic of income inequality. In those pieces, David seemed to accept that income inequality had grown over time, but claimed that it was no big deal because people move up and down the income distribution over the course of their lives—what economists call ‘income mobility’. I pointed out that one of the main sources for David’s claims—a study conducted by the U.S. Treasury in 2007—seemed to 1) confirm the notion that income mobility is low in the U.S., yet still managed to 2) overstate the amount of income mobility we actually have. David promptly composed a follow-up post responding to the former but ignoring the latter, arguing that

Who Cares if People Work Less?

In a post Tim wrote partly as a reply to my piece on the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) recent revelation that Obamacare will drive Americans to work less, he asks why we should care.

While acknowledging that Obamacare will cause workers to “withdraw their labor,” Tim maintains that these workers “will also take home a proportionally smaller share of the economic pie because they will be earning less. So the question is, why do you care how much other people work?”

If people were freely making choices, conservatives would not object. After all, Milton Friedman taught that free people make the best choices for themselves given the incentives they face in the private marketplace.

When Unemployment is Celebrated

In light of recent news that Obamacare discourages employment, the left has applauded the notion that working less is a good thing. But why should we celebrate forced unemployment?

Work disincentives have, until now, been universally recognized as negative for both individuals and society. Liberals, for instance, have agreed that unemployment benefits and food stamps may discourage work to some degree, but have maintained that, on the whole, the benefits simply outweigh the costs.