GM Bailout Fails as Viable Business Test and Industrial Policy
When the "new" GM issued its Initial Public Offering (IPO) as a new company, pundits and the White House applauded the milestone as an example of how the government can surgically intervene in the...
View ArticleFreedom to Fail
Freedom: A Novel, by Jonathan Franzen, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 576 pages, $28Jonathan Franzen may be the country’s most popular literary novelist. In Freedom, his aptly titled new book, he takes...
View ArticlePiling On For Sanity in Airport Security?
Salon's aviation writer, Patrick Smith, is bullish on a plan most recently proposed by the International Air Transport Association to bring some sanity to airport security.The International Air...
View ArticleTop 10 Reasons Business Is Leaving California
From American's For Prosperity and Joe Vranich.
View ArticleBowles-Simpson May Be Resurrected for 112th Congress
Earlier this month, it seemed that the White House budget committee's report was to be tossed aside after it failed to win enough support to prompt immediate congressional action based on its...
View ArticleCarbon Rationing By Other Means
Plan A was to get a massive cap-and-trade carbon rationing scheme adopted by Congress. The scheme aimed at imposing mandatory cuts on U.S. emissions of the greenhouse gases, chiefly carbon dioxide,...
View ArticleTransportation Policy in a New Fiscal Era
On December 10th, the big four transportation groups (AASHTO, AGC, APTA, and ARTBA) sent a joint letter to Congress urging the inclusion of Build America Bonds in the year-end tax bill. But to no...
View ArticleFollow the Bouncing Buck
Two weeks ago, writing in The Washington Post, Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius argued that Americans must be forced to buy government-approved...
View ArticleBoothless, Electronic Tolling Continues to Move Forward
Electronic tolling may no longer be "cutting edge" and perhaps should instead be considered state of the art, conventional technology. Viritually all new tollroads are using electronic tolling...
View ArticleTech Neanderthals as Regulators?
As FCC aggressively takes and end run around Congress and asserts the power to regulate the highly competitive world of Internet access--in order to "ensure fairness" of course--realize there is no...
View ArticleDespite Recession, Texas Continues Infrastructure Investment Through PPPs
Privately financed toll roads have certainly been a controversial issue in Texas (see here, here, here and here.) However in spite of the controversy, officials have been able to apply innovative...
View ArticleThat's Just a "Cognitive Defect" Making You Drink That Soda
Arguments for new and higher taxes on soda, snacks and all the other food items you love are a dime a dozen these days. Still, not every food tax proponent has the courage to center his argument around...
View ArticlePlease Stop "Helping" Us
Last year, Congress passed the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act. It was supposed to really end the alleged abuses perpetrated by the credit card companies. The law...
View ArticleThe Year in Books
Ronald Bailey, science correspondent The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, by Matt Ridley, Harper Collins, 448 pages, $26.99Ideas have sex. In biology, through the evolution of sex some...
View Article2010: The Year John Cage Broke
The week before Christmas, the number 21 spot on the British pop charts was held by a supergroup called Cage Against the Machine, a gang of pop stars who had gathered to record John Cage's 1952...
View ArticleThe ObamaCare Fraud
There are a great many things wrong with Obamacare, but the biggest is perhaps one that neither party is paying any attention to: It is one huge entrapment scheme that will turn patients and providers...
View ArticleGasp! I Have No Words . . .
The power of unions: Average stagehand at Lincoln Center in NYC makes $290K a year. At Avery Fisher Hall and Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center, the average stagehand salary and benefits package is...
View ArticleOver a Billion Dollars for 48 Minutes?!
Ken Orski's latest Innovation Brief takes high speed rail enthusiast's hard look at the Chicago--St. Louis high speed rail plan, and comes up disapointed, to say the least.I single out of his analysis...
View ArticleJapan's Economic Doldrums and Asia's Ascendance
Growing up in the 1970s, I heard a lot of talk about Japan's economic ascendance. This was a particularly powerful analogy for someone growing up in Ohio, where Honda established an economic foothold...
View ArticleWill Airports Punt TSA?
A detailed Washington Post article, As frustration grows, airports consider ditching TSA, points out that:Some of the nation's biggest airports are responding to recent public outrage over security...
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