Joe Biden’s gaffes are usually unplanned slips of the tongue – not pre-meditated social media posts that presumably received approval from staffers prior to publication.
However, his recent Tweet demanding that gas stations lower their prices to alleviate the “pain at the pump” is far more embarrassing than his accidental public speaking fumbles.
Even Jeff Bezos had to correct the President for his ignorance of basic economics, which combined blatant scapegoating with a denial of the universal laws of supply and demand. However, in a nation where the vast majority of citizens have likely never taken an undergraduate economics course, can Biden be blamed for engaging in such classic political opportunism?
Perhaps we can channel former President Barack Obama in considering this a “teachable moment.” Or as Rahm Emmanuel once said, we should never let a good crisis go to waste.
I’m delighted to welcome Professor Emeritus Steven E. Rhoads to the show to discuss the new and substantially revised 35th anniversary edition of his best-selling book, The Economist’s View of the World: And the Quest for Well-Being.
Rhoads wrote the book as an assistant professor at the University of Virginia (home of the Public Choice economics), and was surprised when the original edition skyrocketed to the tops of best-seller lists and made economic principles accessible to millions who would have otherwise believed the fallacies embedded in Biden’s tweet.
David Henderson – editor of the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics – calls it “A Wide-Ranging Book for Non-Economists and Economists” alike, and the WSJ named it one of the best books of 2021.
Steven E. Rhoads and I attempted to distill an entire semester’s worth of economic thinking into a full hour. Don’t miss it.
