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Welcome to my homepage !
The "Projects" page includes information about our book Artists and Markets in Music (Routledge 2024), the Cantillon effect in arts markets, as well as other writings on political economy. Some of my research is also available on SSRN, RePEc and Google Scholar.
"Personal Info" has information about our Hardfire TV program on Brooklyn Free Speech Media and about the Reggae Sunsplash Preservation Society. We have created a film archive and are restoring, digitizing and streaming more than 200 hours of concert film.
"Teaching" contains syllabi for the courses I taught for 13 years until the covid era. Here you can find the self-study principles of economics course I created with my Cameron's Teaching Modules YouTube channel in order to make the lectures avalable to my 200 students, all dispersed to various parts of the world during the lockdown period.
On the "eBooks" page you can download Economics for Everyone, 2nd Edition, which includes a section on the Austrian School Explanation for the Business-Cycle, and which can help explain today's on-going inflation.
Thank you,
Cameron
Brooklyn, NY USA
contact: cameron_weber@hotmail.com
"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for something he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him." - Robert Heinlein
"Free trade is, I suggest, one issue which allows classical liberals to define themselves." - James Buchanan
George Will's opinion column in the Washigton Post, "Elon Musk vows to cut $2 trillion in federal spendng, Good luck." This spending cut would require addressing social welfare, a third rail in US politics. Will also calls it a free 'public education' (as in a lesson in public choice theory) for the word's richest person. December 2024.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has a recent report recommending changes to the US government budget process which include adressing explicitly the budget deficit with each appropriations act in order to save the nation the catastrophe of default on its debt. December 2024.
The great economist Stephen Moore suggests in the New York Post ways the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) can save federal taxpayer money. December 2024.
In addition to those ideas enumerated by Moore, I would add: 1) remove the tax write-off on debt repayments from the tax-code, to reduce financialization of the economy and above normal profits to banks, 2) require that not-for-proift organizations such as universities and museums pay capital gains taxes on their endowments as is required of those in the private sector, and 3) that alt-curencies such as Bitcoin be exempt from capital gains taxes so that there might be competitive currencies to keep the central bank currency honest. This last idea is best articulated in F.A. Hayek's work on the denationalization of money project. December 2024.
Realtime Inequality data visualization project from UC Berkeley.
Note that many common measures of inequality exclude state transfers received by the poor, non-salary benefits received by the middle class and taxes paid by the rich. The Economist has a piece on the current debate in economics over inequality. December 2023.
Truflation is a source of reatime alternative data and shows that the inflation of the "bubble economy" inherited from the covid era has not receded consistently. December 2024.
The Economist finds that the nationalism and protectionsim in the US's trade policy including the industrial policy in the IRA is creating a subsidy war with other nations, what we can call a "race to the bottom" or "beggar they neighbor" foreign policy. January 2023.
There was more than $6 trillion in 'emergency' spending during the covid era and continuing through today as much of these fiscal transfers have yet to be disbursed. Politically-based spending for votes today passes debt to those not-voting and those yet born. This has increased drastically in the last 15 years:
The risk rating for US government debt was downgraded in August 2023 due to the untenable debt situation. Wolf Street is good on this.
The most recent Financial Report for the US Government (2023) shows that total publicly-held debt and unfunded social programs are at $104 trillion, or $313,000 per person. February 2024.
Now that the covid era is over it is time to do some stock-taking:
MIT and NBER find the Paycheck Protection Plan is distribution upward and that it costs around $200,000 "per job saved". The average cost of employment in the private sector for wages and benefits is around $75,000. January 2022. The Federal Reserve Bank also finds that the PPP is regressive policy in that the more wealthy are recipients of these grants. July 2022.
NBER finds that federal covid "relief" transfers to states and municipalities cost more than $850,000 "per job saved". June 2022. Note that these transfers are also based on political party-affiliation patronage.
Arnold & Porter has created the CARES Act Fraud Tracker and has found that more than $150 billion has been stolen or fraudulent, updated often. March 2023.
OpenTheBooks.org finds that the NIH, specifically the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, receives more than $700 million in royalties from pharmaceutical firms in 2022 and 2023. Many of these payments go to individuals within the NIH, and not just to the NIH itself. June 2024.
The Global Disinformation Index places those media outlets which criticize the NIH's pandemic reponse, and those reporting on politically sensitive events during the presidential election of 2020, on their "dynamic exclusion list". Exclusion lists are used to direct on-line media buys toward some media platforms and not others. The GDI brief recommending exclusion is issued one month before the election. The GDI is funded by the US State Department until April 2023.
"Myths of the 1 Percent: What Puts Some People at the Top", J. Rothwell, NYT, November 2017. Those working in sectors protected from competition by government policy continuously receive super-profits and capture wealth faster than everyone else.
"If People Were Paid by Ability, Inequality Would Drop", Rothwell has another article related to the above, this one on how professional associations have historically excluded minority groups from membership, November 2019.
Edmund Phelps, New York Review of Books, "What is Wrong with the West's Economies?", August 2015. Utilitarian and Rawlsian philosophies as manifested in policy in the modern welfare state has reduced entrepreneurship, human creativity and self-determination.
"Monopoly Isn't Always What We Think It Is", J.R. Rogers, Law & Liberty, November 2018. If there are no barriers to entry, there is no monopoly. And who best to limit competition but the state with its monopoloy on legal coercion.
This is the Government Accountability Office (GAO) Report of 2024 which determines the nation's fiscal health is unsustainable without substantive changes to welfare state entitlement programs.
Law and Liberty August 2022 article on what the Federal Reserve can do right and wrong, and needed reforms to reach that end.
This is T. L. Knapp's Freedom News Daily on google groups, a good news compiler.
This is something very funny, a Princeton professor lists on his CV all of his failures.
For fans of economics, here is a photo of the Economics Faculty building in Belgrade, Serbia (the center of economics for the former Yugoslavia).
From BYO Records, UK and from Nancy Folbre's website.
Here's Hayek's 1944 Road to Serfdom in cartoons, courtesy of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE).
Paul Kelpe, Machinery (Abstract #2), 1933-34.
Here is the Living New Deal website, they have mapped more than 16,000 New Deal sites, including artwork. Although I think their economic program for today is faulty I support their historical work.
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