Daily Archives: August 23, 2011

Google announced last week that it was taking over Motorola Mobility for a whopping $12.5 billion. The acquisition provides Google with 17,000 patents with another 7,500 pending. This is the largest acquisition Google has made by far. Google’s chief executive, Larry Page, said it would help to “protect Android from anti-competitive threats.” The Economist hasContinue Reading

While the federal government struggles with its debt and unsustainable deficit spending, a number of state governments are moving forward with surpluses. Cal Thomas highlights them in his latest column. Nowhere has the economic turnaround been more immediate than in Virginia. When Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell took office in January 2010, he was faced withContinue Reading

As a rule, I try to avoid linking to Kathleen Parker’s columns, but I’m making an exception this afternoon. Her piece from Aug. 19, titled “What’s wrong with these bleeping people,” reflects my own consternation with the coarsening of society: Scene: An elevator in New York Presbyterian Hospital where several others and I were temporaryContinue Reading

Writing on Cato@Liberty, Johns Hopkins economics professor Steve Hanke discusses the problem of “regime uncertainty.” People hesitate to invest when they don’t know what curve balls (or bean balls, for that matter) government policy will throw at them. Hanke properly credits historian Robert Higgs for developing the idea, which Higgs originally applied to FDR’s NewContinue Reading

Last weekend, people from across the country came together to disobey the lunacy of permit requirements for lemonade stands. You could be forgiven for not realizing such activity was illegal, even on private property, but some authoritarians see no end to their legitimacy. Lemonade Freedom Day organizers sought to bring attention to the imposition onContinue Reading

It ought to be the other way around. Don Boudreaux praises entrepreneurs in this article and explains what conditions are conducive to entrepreneurship. The more tightly controlled a society is, the less freedom to innovate. That is one of the unseen casualties of every politicized nation. People never know what they have missed because theContinue Reading

The decision of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals that the mandate to purchase insurance is unconstitutional, it isn’t the only aspect of that legislative monstrosity that is. Consider the letter below in today’s Wall Street Journal: ObamaCare Raises a Number of Constitutional Issues The reasoning of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals against theContinue Reading

Nouriel Roubini is one of those unjustly famous economists who gets a lot of attention because he spouts the standard establishment lines about how the free market is dangerous and we need government control — including central banking. Recently he opined that the long history of financial panics and recessions can be laid at theContinue Reading