Daily Archives: April 25, 2011

A key tenet of “public-choice” economic theory involves the incentives politicians face to make decisions with short-term benefits, regardless of the long-term costs. (As Thomas Sowell has explained,”Economists may say that there is no such thing as a free lunch, but politicians get elected by promising free lunches.”) A brief article in the latest BloombergContinue Reading

Want to get big money out of politics? OK. Make government less important in people’s lives. In the meantime, we’re likely to see more stories like the one in the latest Bloomberg Businessweek focusing on the president’s money chase: Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager and a former deputy White House chief of staff, has triedContinue Reading

Blame me — not Dave Bing — for mangling the opening words of one of Nat King Cole’s most famous choruses. But Bing, the former NBA star and current Detroit mayor, planted the seed in my head because of his comments to Bloomberg Businessweek about the Motor City’s future: The only way to fix thisContinue Reading

So argues J. Kevin Meaders in this essay published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute today. The prodigious increase in the money supply, he contends will easily boost the price of gas to $7 or more.  

The historian Niall Ferguson invokes the famous 20th-century British economist — whose policies tend to find favor among free-spending politicians, as Roy Cordato has explained — in a new Newsweek column: Keynes was a believer in government deficits as a short-term expedient to combat depression. But even he would have regarded America’s current fiscal trajectoryContinue Reading

Duke University professor Harris Cooper says that it is time to rethink how we organize the school calendar. Let’s excuse Dr. Cooper for his mistaken belief that the purpose of summer vacation was to allow “kids to be off to work in the fields.”  Rather, let’s entertain the notion that we should increase the numberContinue Reading

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an appalling bit of propaganda by teacher union boss Randi Weingarten, “Markets Aren’t the Education Solution.” It’s heavy with red herrings and strawman arguments. Don Boudreaux’s reply is delectable. Editor, The Wall Street Journal 1211 6th Ave. New York, NY 10036 Dear Editor: Randi Weingarten insists that “markets aren’t theContinue Reading

…you believe that the earth has rights but a baby inside its mother’s womb (apparently not part of the earth) does not.