How Many Jobs?

Minimum wage obviously.

How many people would hire workers to cut down trees, build extra rooms, etc.?

Before Steve Sailer beats me to it, I’d like to turn that question around to the demand side: how many extra rooms would people have? how many more children would they have once they get the extra rooms?

Also, how much would it help to avoid housing bubbles, the fact that people can have a bigger house without having to move?
Would not the increased supply of floor space stabilize the housing market?

Drugs.

Got to be the biggest possible change.

Or for an entirely minimal one, how about the European Union’s “jams, jellies, marmalades and sweet chestnut purees regulations (as amended 2004)*.”

In this it becomes a criminal offence (punishable by up to 6 months in jail and or a £5,000 fine) to add essential oils of citrus to jam. Such oils may only be added to marmalades, the distinction being that marmalades are made from citrus fruits while jams are made from non citrus fruits.

So vital innovation in the jam and compote making industry is stymied: who knows whether a cherry jam sharpened up with a bit of lemony zest would be a good idea, taste nice or be a decent seller? We’ll never find out because to even make the experiment is illegal.

In order to be able to make our lemony cherry jam we would have to persuade the European Commission to revisit the regulation, then get the European Parliament to pass it (after the Council of Ministers had had their say) and then it must be passed by the national legislatures of 27 countries plus innumerable devolved administrations (Wales, Scotland, the German Lander,etc)encompassing perhaps 10,000 legislators and the associated bureaucrats, mistresses and aides.

And yes, Europe is festooned with these regulations, about everything.

* No, I’m not joking**, this is a real law.

** No, I’m really not joking, this is the same law that defines carrots as fruit***.

*** No, really.

As I wrote for Mises.org, zoning laws ( http://blog.mises.org/12598/zoning-laws-destroy-communities/ ) are highly destructive of wealth. They prevent people from starting businesses in their own homes, thus preventing untold millions of starup businesses.

Liquor sales prohibitions. Where I live you can only buy wine and liquor in the city limits. Beer sales only in the country. It’s a 20 mile drive to the nearest liquor store. If the county (actually counties since I live at the intersection of 3) went wet, a liquor store would open up out this way.

I wonder what the global warming footprint of liquor sales prohibitions is? A lot of people driving a lot of miles for a bottle of wine with dinner.

Or just the liquor by the drink prohibitions. A suburban city a friend works in voted down liquor by the drink about 9 months ago, they had about a half a dozen national restaurant chains ready to build if the prohibition had been removed. Instead, along the undeveloped access corridor from the freeway to the city proper is just overgrown land with for sale signs.

How about the state monopoly on liquor sales in virginia. Studies have been done and found that the state would increase their tax revenue by privatizing the stores. Not to mention that they wouldn’t have the expense of paying gov’t workers (liquor store employees).
I live in a county in KY where almost every county below is dry (can’t sell alcohol) so there are tons of bootleggers who buy in bulk and re-sell them back to consumers south of here. lol its funny how silly gov’t regulation creates these black markets and takes away tax revenue from other counties.

It has to be land use related. Here’s from today’s Carpe Diem from Mark Perry:

MP: The graph above shows that Texas never had a real estate bubble like those in California, Florida, Arizona or Nevada. Consequently, Texas never had the real estate crash like in the other states. This article presents an interesting perspective about how restrictive land use policies contributed to the real estate bubbles around the country, and how Texas escaped the Great Recession due to more liberal land use policies.

Don’t take this the wrong way… but I think you are a deck short. Your deck of workers to match to jobs is a useful way of thinking about it… but it’s incomplete without the deck of outputs and the deck of consumers. In other words, there are a chain of cards and decks… matching workers to jobs, jobs to outputs, and outputs ot consumers. Even if we were to succeed in matching workers to job well… if outputs don’t match to consumers well, you still have a recalculation to do.

Basically, what you have is a cascade of recalculations going back. Consumers abruptly changed their preference for outputs, so the outputs to consumers has to be recalculated. Which causes a recalculation of jobs to outputs, which causes a recalculation of workers to jobs.

The economy of course, naturally does this sort of recalculation all the time. So what you ideally want is:
1) The maximum velocity of recalculation you can get
2) The minimum nudge away from a stable equilibrium you can manage.

The current ‘Great Recalculation’ has occurred because various artificial factors pushed the economy away from stable equlibrium for far to long… and then various other artificial factors (government policy, I’m looking at you) have greatly reduced the velocity of recalculation.

I think these broad strokes paint the wrong picture.

On the island of Hilton Head, SC and neighboring Bluffton, SC, local ordinance requires all commercial buildings to be set back a certain distance from the road, nearly out of view, and for businesses along the road to be built behind a layer of trees (this includes fast food franchises, grocery stores, etc). Obviously this is an attempt at keeping some of the beauty of the area intact (and very effective at that) while also serving the island with many of the amenities it’s affluent tourist clientelle have grown accustomed to back home. You may say this stifles employment, but in this case I believe the opposite has happened. Hilton Head has every common commercial chain you could ask for, they just put their buildings back a few dozen feet. But, by keeping the island from turning into one continuous strip mall like many neighboring resort towns (Myrtle Beach), Hilton Head has become the destination of the more affluent vacationers in South Carolina.

Licensure of barbers

In Fairfax County Virginia (home to George Mason Univ.) you are allowed to have a home office with one employee that is not a resident of the home. The cost for this license is $50. To secure a license to have two employees a businessman must make an application and pay a $15,000 application fee.

The fee is for the application and does not guarantee one will get the needed permission.

I’m so happy the ruling class is there to protect me.

Although the US already allows $500 million in exports to Cuba, we could dramatically expand that if we lifted the restrictions that require getting a specific export permit and limitations that the government of Cuba must pay cash in advance, through a third-country bank.

If we also allowed American tourism to Cuba, not only could this bring additional jobs in the US travel & transport industry, the additional tourist money in Cuba could help to increase imports from the US.

In trying to be along the same lines as the original post, I would suggest a more limited and noncontroversial deregulation – allowing dancing in any restaurant, bar, etc. Here in over-regulated California, it’s common for cities to only allow very limited numbers of nightclub licenses, while there are substantially more places with liquor licenses. The result are many bars that serve drinks and play music, but where no one is allowed to dance. It is a not infrequent occurrence in restaurants and bars here to have to intervene when a patron dances and stop them from dancing because it’s not allowed by their permit.

Surely there are at least arguable reasons (though perhaps not ultimately good ones) for prohibitions on alcohol sales, prostitution, various drugs, etc. But dancing is a low risk activity with positive health benefits and social benefits. If particular restaurants or bars didn’t want to allow dancing because it doesn’t fit their business model, they could choose not to allow it, but why should any government do so?

This is in California? Sounds like Elmore City, Ok (the town in Footloose), only a whole different religion is in charge.

What are home prices like in Pacific Grove? Sowell often writes about the zoning restrictions and supply and what that does to home prices.

He also writes about hypocrisy of the people who support the laws as they are usually created and enforced by people who say they support things like helping the poor and diversity, yet the zoning laws act against these goals.

selling beer to people on the beach. What if the governments here were to allow that. How many additional people would find work?

Doc Henderson,

We already have this in North Carolina. I took advantage of it this past weekend. Of course, the city council is looking to shut it down because, “[we] just don’t know who is buying the beer” as if they did in the stores.