That 80s Show
Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now—Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything, by David Sirota, Ballantine Books, 220 pages, $251971 saw the debut of All in the Family,...
View ArticleOf Cheeseburgers and Publicly Funded Convention Centers
The Maryland Public Policy Institute's Marta Mossburg is beating a drum that simply can't be beat loud enough: Stop throwing public tax dollars down the convention center rabbit hole. Or maybe it's a...
View ArticleBing Leading the Dialogue on Privatization in Detroit
The Detroit News reports Detroit Mayor Dave Bing is “seriously considering privatizing garbage collection to improve collections and save cash.” Mayor Bing’s proposal could save taxpayers nearly $14...
View ArticleGM and Chrysler Bailouts Unnecessary and Expensive
University of Pennsylvania law professor David Skeel has an excellent article in the Wall Street Journal (June 5, 2011) challenging the notion that the GM and Chrysler bailouts are a "success" story....
View ArticleObama and the Pursuit of Endless War
When historians sit down decades from now to address the events of the early 21st century, they will have no trouble explaining why Americans elected Barack Obama president. They elected him out of a...
View ArticleLegal Cartels Drive Up Subsidies for Sports Stadiums
Steve Malanga has a very accessible article on the warped world of professional sports stadium subsidies over at RealClearMarkets. Economists are remarkably consistent in their criticism of public...
View ArticleMuddled Masses
One Saturday morning in May 2010, Francisco Gomez Escobar was walking just yards from his apartment building, chatting with his roommate and friend Edith Santiago. Gomez, a 35-year-old landscaper from...
View ArticleThe Guilt Market
Criminal snitches are a pervasive feature of the justice system that the public rarely sees. Every year thousands of offenders offer information to the government on street corners, in the back of...
View ArticleRenters are Fiscally Responsible Too
Like it or not, the American Dream is being redefined before our very eyes. Homeownership has long been held up as a preeminent virtue for every U.S. worker, but in the wake of the housing bubble, more...
View ArticleMedicare's Least Bad Fix
Let me say at the outset that I think both ObamaCare and RyanCare are a dog’s breakfast, a hodgepodge of unappetizing ideas that won’t cure the nation’s core health care problem—out-of-control...
View ArticleA Free Market Reading List on Transportation Policy and Planning
As we continue to immerse ourselves in the soap opera of federal transportation reauthorization, I thought it might be useful to plug several recent books on transportation policy presenting free...
View ArticleObama's War on the Rule of Law
Evidence that the growth of government is a one-way ratchet continues to mount in Washington, where President Obama's pieties about abiding by the rule of law are eclipsing "one word: plastics" as a...
View ArticlePerverted Justice
“If we had been aware of his record,” says Maureen Kanka, “my daughter would be alive today.” She is referring, in a statement on the website of an anti-crime group she founded, to Jesse Timmendequas,...
View Article"If It's Plastic, It's Organic"
A couple of months ago, an invitation from a public relations firm dropped into my email to participate in an “invitation-only tour” of Dole Food Company pineapple and banana plantations in Costa Rica...
View ArticleThe Price of Prohibition
Forty years ago this Friday, President Richard Nixon announced that "public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse." Declaring that "the problem has assumed the dimensions of a national...
View ArticleI, Pineapple
This is my second dispatch from a junket sponsored by the Dole Food Company touring their banana and pineapple plantations and facilities in Costa Rica. The company has gathered a group of “key leaders...
View ArticleMore on the Housing Bubble and the Politics of Land Use Planning
Wendell Cox's recent study for the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) on how planning may have influenced the size and scope of the housing bubble is getting well deserved press. The Wall Stree...
View ArticleWhat Would Ayn Rand Do?
For a group that claims to be offended by the mere whiff of politics and religion's intermingling, the left sure does bring up Jesus quite a lot.The most recent outburst is the work of a progressive...
View ArticleWA State Auditor Report on Performance-Based Contracting
The Washington State Auditor's Office recently released a useful report on performance-based contracting (prepared by Berk & Associates) as part of its State Government Performance Review...
View ArticleUnfair Labor Practices
The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 granted sweeping legal privileges to organized labor, including the right to exclusively represent all workers in a unionized shop and the right to go out on...
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