I have come across some excellent YouTube presentations by
Professor Antony Davis, Professor of Economics at Duquesne University, and the Milton
Friedman Distinguished Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.
Let me recommend, for example, his 20-minute presentation on
the 10 Myths of
Government Debt. It certainly disproved some things that I believed. For
example, could we help the problem by raising taxes on the rich? Sounds reasonable.
I certainly believed so, and lots of politicians make this argument. But the
data actually show, from 1950 to the present, that federal revenue as a
percentage of GDP has stayed almost flat at about 17% whether the top tax
bracket was 91%, as it was in the 1950s, or 30%, as it was in the 1990s. So
that belief is simply not supported by the data (not that many would change
their mind just because the data didn’t support their belief).
Or try, for example, his 19-minutes presentation 5 Inequality
Myths, or his presentation Why Government
Fails.
Again, as in my previous post, I am amazed at how much we all
think we know that simply isn’t so. It reminds me again of Mark Twain’s comment: It ain't so much the things that people don't know that makes trouble in
this world, as it is the things
that people know that ain't so
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