After watching a video about invitation for Filipinos to study, work, and migrate to New Zealand, I searched for articles to find the nation’s economic situation. Among seven articles, I found Maurice P. McTigue’s lecture very educational. The lecture was about the reduction of the size of government. I gleaned several lessons from the lecture, and reduced them into seven.
Read the article here.
Thomas Piketty’s book first caught my attention last April 16, but it is only now that I decided to buy it. I made a list of reviews of this book, and the first book review I read was done by John Cassidy on March 31. The most recent review is made by George Reisman just today.
As for the importance of the book, you will notice that even Austrian economists do not agree in their assessment. There are those who dismissed it as a product of a socialist mindset. At least one Austrian reviewer appreciates it as a model of genuine scholarship. Even at Amazon, there are reviewers who gave the book as high as five star ratings, and others with just one star. And of course, those who admire Piketty find in the book a strong intellectual defense causing conservatives to panic.
I begin with God’s revelation, not human speculation. I begin with Genesis, not Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) or John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936) or Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action (1949) or Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (1961). This may bother economists, but so what? I do not expect economists to read an economic commentary on the Book of Genesis. – Gary North
Yesterday was the 116th Philippine Independence Day. It was also a day I think I returned home.
What I mean by returning home is that by the grace of God, I think I already started a journey that I should have started few years back. Anyway, it doesn’t matter now whether I came home early or late; the important thing is I returned.
But this does not mean that I am now shielded either from turning left or right. Life is all a matter of grace.
And so I want to introduce my new blog – eating an elephant – and here are the first three articles I wrote:
After browsing the third chapter of Ludwig von Mises’ Bureaucracy, I could not avoid thinking about the kind of economic system that we have in the Philippines. Capitalism is the popular perception. Others would consider our system as oligarchy, that is, not much different from feudalism. However, after reading the third chapter and checking some news and files, I am now more inclined to think that our economic system is still under experiment between socialism and capitalism. In fact, in the past, we were more inclined to socialism due to big number of GOCCs (Government Owned and Controlled Corporations)/SOEs (State Owned Enterprises). Nonoy Oplas, the owner of this blog shared that as of 1984, we had “303 GOCCs including subsidiaries.” However, as I browsed the web, I stumbled with two lists. One list gave a total of 67 GOCCs, and another list gave 133 as of 2004. So if the data is correct, it means that there is a reduction in number of GOCCs, which I personally consider as good sign. In fact, one news said that our President is aiming to reduce its number to less than 100.
You can read the third chapter of Bureaucracy here.
By the way, these are the previous articles:
Studies in Economics 