Free Parking versus Free Markets: A Review Essay on Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking

Donald Shoup has written a massive tome on parking. This essay summarizes the key insights, evaluates the contribution, and interprets Shoup’s work as a form of strategic writing.Parking; parking requirements; curb parking; parking benefit district; privatization; decontrol; spontaneous order; esoteric writing; strategic writing

Resorting to Statism to Find Meaning:Conservatism and Leftism

The paper develops the idea of configuration of ownership to distinguish three primary political ideologies: (classical) liberalism, conservatism, and leftism. The liberal configuration is atomistic in its recognition of owners and ownership claims; it conforms closely to Adam Smith’s “commutative justice,” which Smith represented as a sort of social grammar. The conservative configuration also strives for a social grammar, but it counts among the set of owners certain spirit-lords such as God and Patria. The liberal and conservative configurations become isomorphic if and only if the ownership claims of the conservative spirit-lords are reduced to nothing. The left configuration ascribes fundamental ownership of resources to the people, the state, and sees laws as organizational house-rules into which one enters voluntary by choosing to remain within the polity; the type of justice that pertains is parallel to Smith’s “distributive justice,” which Smith associated with aspirational rules for achieving beauty in composition. The scheme illuminates why the left’s conception of liberty consists in civil liberties. The formulation of configurations is used to interpret the semantics of the three primary ideologies. Meanwhile, it is noted that actually existing parties and movements are admixtures of the three primary ideologies. For example, what makes Republicanism “conservative” is that it is relatively conservative; it by no means thoroughly or consistently rejects the precept of collective ownership by the polity.ownership; justice; liberalism; statism; conservatism; leftism;

From Weight Watchers to State Watchers: Towards a Narrative of Liberalism

Alan Kahan’s Mind vs. Money: The War between Intellectuals and Capitalism (Transaction Publishers, 2010) treats intellectuals as a class, and tells of intellectuals’ yearning to play the role of cleric and of aristocrat. Kahan says that intellectuals are necessarily alienated from “capitalism.” In this essay I discuss Kahan’s erudite and insightful – though sometimes exasperating – work, and I take the opportunity to develop some ideas on the topic, ideas in line with Hayek’s thought.Intellectuals; capitalism; liberalism; statism; Hayek

In Defense of Dwelling in Great Minds: A Few Quotations from Michael Polanyi’s The Study of Man

It seems like a small and perhaps shrinking minority of economists know reverence of individual figures. Most economists seem to be without heroes, and sometimes disparage reverence as cultish idolatry. Here I collect from Michael Polanyi’s The Study of Man (1959) a few passages that eloquently suggest that “we need reverence to perceive greatness, even as we need a telescope to observe spiral nebulae.” The selection is made in the defense of seeking out and communing with great minds.greatness; reverence; heroes; calling

Executive Compensation in American Unions

[Exerpt] Studying compensation in the nonprofit sector is difficult. In nonprofit organizations, it is not always clear what the objectives of the organization are and, therefore, perhaps even more difficult to consider how to compensate managers than in the for-profit sector. This paper investigates the determinants of executive compensation of leaders of American labor unions. We use panel data on more than 75,000 organization-years of unions from 2000 to 2007 which allows us to examine within union differences over time. We specifically concentrate on two issues of importance to unions – the level of membership and the wages of union members. Both measures are strongly related to the compensation of the leaders of American labor unions, even after controlling for organization size and individual organization fixed-effects. That is, within the same union, higher levels of membership size and average member wage over time are associated with higher levels of pay for union leaders. Additionally, the elasticity of pay with respect to membership for unions is very similar to the elasticity of pay with respect to employees in for-profit firms over the same period

Measurement of the Dielectric Constant and Loss Tangent of Thallium Mixed Halide Crystals KRS-5 and KRS-6 at 95 GHz

The dielectric constants and loss tangents of KRS-5 and KRS-6 thallium halide mixed crystals have been measured at 95 GHz using both the shorted waveguide (SWG) reflection method and the Fabry-Perot (F-P) transmission method on samples filling standard WR-10 waveguide. The results--KRS-5: epsilon'/sub r/ = 31; tan delta = 1.8 x 10/sup -2/; KRS-6: epsilon'/sub r/ = 29, tan delta = 2 x 10/sup-2/-- agree reasonably well with a simple theoretical fit to the far-infrared Iattice absorption of TIBr and TICI centered at about 1400 GHz. The dielectric samples were hot-pressed into copper wafers with dimensions matching WR-10 waveguide, and then machined and polished to obtain flat, parallel air-dielectric interfaces

Executive Compensation in American Unions (CRI 2009-007)

Studying compensation in the nonprofit sector is difficult. In nonprofit organizations, it is not always clear what the objectives of the organization are and, therefore, perhaps even more difficult to consider how to compensate managers than in the for-profit sector. This paper investigates the determinants of executive compensation of leaders of American labor unions. We use panel data on more than 75,000 organization-years of unions from 2000 to 2007. We specifically concentrate on two issues of importance to unions – the level of membership and the wages of union members. Both measures are strongly related to the compensation of the leaders of American labor unions, even after controlling for organization size and individual organization fixed-effects. Additionally, the elasticity of pay with respect to membership for unions is very similar to the elasticity of pay with respect to employees in for profit firms over the same period

Further application of a semi-microscopic core-particle coupling method to the properties of Gd155,157, and Dy159

In a previous paper a semi-microscopic core-particle coupling method that includes the conventional strong coupling core-particle model as a limiting case, was applied to spectra and electromagnetic properties of several well-deformed odd nuclei. This work, coupled a large single-particle space to the ground state bands of the neighboring even cores. In this paper, we generalize the theory to include excited bands of the cores, such as beta and gamma bands, and thereby show that the resulting theory can account for the location and structure of all bands up to about 1.5 MeV.Comment: 15 pages including 9 figure(postscript), submitted to Phys.Rev.