If you want to feel some people have a worse grasp on this than you, ask a libertarian

Cheerful libertarian. Via David Brin.

Libertortionist economist Tyler Cowen wrote his own not-so-short Shorter for a piece at Bloomberg arguing for a silver lining to the Covid-19 cloud: it may destroy us all, but at least it will definitely destroy that noxious progressive left, forcing all its adherents, if any of them survive, to realize that Dr. Cowen was right all along:

— The egalitarianism of the progressive left ... will seem like a faint memory. Elites are most likely to support wealth redistribution when they feel comfortable themselves, and indeed well-off coastal elites in California and the Northeast are a backbone of the progressive movement. But when these people feel threatened in their lives or occupations, or when the futures of their children suddenly seem less secure, redistribution will not be such a compelling ideal…

I'm not interested in arguing that his ghoulish prediction is wrong, beyond noting that it's self-evidently silly, like people in some French town in 1348 wondering whether the Black Death would bring people to reject religion or cling more tightly to it (it clearly helped to bring on both, the secularization of the Renaissance and the theocracy of the Inquisition, along with a third option nobody foresaw, the creation of the new religion we call Protestantism).

But I would like to give some serious attention to the undeclared assumption that there is some crucial overlap between some or all (depending on which sentence you look at) of the members of the undefined class of "the progressive left", and some of the members of the undefined class of "elites" who are frequently well-off and frequently live in California or "the Northeast", which begs so many questions it ought to be arrested for vagrancy.

Stupid Economist Tricks: Hurricane Pricing

Image via The Pediatric Insider.

On September 5 professional economist Tyler Cowen was explaining over at Bloomberg (via Edroso's Twitter feed) about how

Price Gouging Can Be a Type of Hurricane Aid

Higher prices can help resources get to the people who need them most.

And on September 6 we began hearing about airlines dealing with the advent of Irma by jacking prices up almost exactly 900%:

Totally unacceptable, a $358 flight from Miami to NYC went up to $3578. Why should expect anything decent from these airlines??? F ing RATS! https://t.co/rjdH6J0yOL

— Joseph Pep Nodarse (@joerileyhudson) September 6, 2017

Because who needs a flight out of Miami most? The one who can afford to pay $3600 for the privilege. By Paul Ryan's famous definition of freedom—