This is from ESPN.com.

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama honored the NHL’s Boston Bruins for their 2011 Stanley Cup championship, but one key member of the team was absent.

Goaltender Tim Thomas, one of only two Americans from the 2011 Stanley Cup team, decided not to join his teammates.

Thomas posted the following statement on his Facebook page at 6 p.m. ET:

“I believe the Federal government has grown out of control, threatening the Rights, Liberties, and Property of the People.

This is being done at the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial level. This is in direct opposition to the Constitution and the Founding Fathers vision for the Federal government.

Because I believe this, today I exercised my right as a Free Citizen, and did not visit the White House. This was not about politics or party, as in my opinion both parties are responsible for the situation we are in as a country. This was about a choice I had to make as an INDIVIDUAL.

This is the only public statement I will be making on this topic. TT”

I, of course, entirely agree with Mr. Thomas’s sentiments. Also, unlike so many other sports stars who, whenever they unleash themselves on Facebook or Twitter, are an embarrassment to the English language and coherent thought, Mr. Thomas is well-spoken, reasonable, and clear. Cheers to that!

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I’m flying to New Orleans this weekend to be a member on a panel of Walter Block’s former students as he receives the Ludwig von Mises’ Institute’s Schlarbaum Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Liberty.

No one is more deserving than Walter. As my undergraduate mentor, he is one of two individuals I can credit with my decision to be an economist; of those two, he is surely the one that made me open to the radically free market views that I largely embrace today.

Walter has mentored countless – and I’m exaggerating but little using that word – of undergraduates towards graduate programs in economics. Walter has a unique and amazing ability to excite students about the field of economics. He challenges and prods; protests against students’ “common knowledge” about the world but, at the same time, has a uncanny ability to make a student seem intelligently engaged in the debate; respected. (That’s a balancing act that I can’t claim to have ever quite mastered!)

Congratulations to Walter! I can’t wait to see him this weekend!

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By his having articulated them in the WSJ, these are also are four reasons that Allan Meltzer is getting it right.

“First, big increases in spending and government deficits raise the prospect of future tax increases.”

“Second, most of the government spending programs redistribute income from workers to the unemployed.”

“Third, Keynesian models totally ignore the negative effects of the stream of costly new regulations that pour out of the Obama bureaucracy.”

“Fourth, U.S. fiscal and monetary policies are mainly directed at getting a near-term result.”

Meltzer, of course, elaborates further on each.

The third is my favorite. In addition to them being “costly” in the straightforward sense, Meltzer hones in on the unpredictable nature of this “stream” of new regulations. It’s time to put in orders for the 2012 election season’s buttons-du-jour: : “It’s the uncertainty, stupid!”

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At our reading group last night we ended up on an (off-topic) discussion about the research of one of our graduate students. Her research concerns HIV prevalence in relation to the extent of democracy and censorship in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Long story short, Tom Darnley, one of our undergrad participants, suggested that as incomes rise the range of goods and services that become available increases. Sex, on the other hand, is basically – hopefully! – available in all initial conditions. Therefore, all else equal, as incomes rise the quantity demanded of sex (and, therefore, the opportunities for exposure to HIV) decreases.

For this effect to result in a net decrease in HIV exposure, there needs to be a slew of other things that hold true. For example, the quantity demanded of other HIV-risky goods (e.g., shared intravenous needles for use of drugs) does not increase to the point of offsetting the less-sex-effect; or shared needles are also an inferior good to the extent that this offsets increased drug use.

Still, Tom’s reasoning was straightforward; solid Econ 101 stuff. I’ve never heard someone refer to sex (at least generally) as “inferior”, so I found this very amusing.

Even better: Tom subsequently found a comic that looks like it was written based on our reading group conversation.

Nice.

HT to smbc-comics.com.

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Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims were announced today as co-recipients of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

I was pleasantly surprised.

The surprise for me was the fact that two architects of the dominant macroeconometric paradigm won. Mainstream macro has taken a pounding in terms of its image, and I would have thought that these two would have fallen victim to the collective black eye. (Conditional on the prize going to macro, I would have expected someone like Jess Benhabib with work on indeterminacy. Benhabib’s work is relatively less influential but in a more fashionable niche.)

The work of Sargent and Sims profoundly influenced my thinking about applied empirical work during graduate school. (I also learned graduate macro theory out of Sargent’s Macroeconomic Theory.)

While I would not put either on my list of intellectual heroes, I am happy that the Committee made another solid choice. (Unlike the Peace Prize, I have a hard time finding egregious errors on the Economics Prize list, though there are some painful omissions in my view – where’s Tullock?!)

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