Some thoughts. While a lot of people will continue to live in California despite it’s relative lack of economic freedom (like me, for one, for a while), there’s been a lot of outward migration to Texas.
Category Archives: Economics
Growing The Energy Supply
It comes from markets, not bureaucrats:
There is a lesson here for public policy generally, including health care. No centralized government expert predicted the vast expansion in energy supply from hydraulic fracking. It was produced by decentralized specialists in firms subject to market competition.
Just as Friedrich Hayek taught, no central planner can know or foresee enough to produce the beneficial results regularly produced by competition in free markets regulated in accordance with the rule of law. And no central planner can accurately predict the course of innovation that can be achieved in decentralized markets. That’s something you might want to keep in mind when someone tells you that Medicare costs can be controlled by 15 members of an unelected board created by Obamacare. Better results and lower costs can be expected with the kind of market competition set up by the 2003 Medicare prescription drug law.
We can’t get rid of these unjustifiably arrogant ignorami soon enough. But it’s less than a year and a half to judgment day.
Fact Checking The President
The strangest thing about this is the source. Even the WaPo says that he’s full of it on the auto bailout
We take no view on whether the administration’s efforts on behalf of the automobile industry were a good or bad thing; that’s a matter for the editorial pages and eventually the historians. But we are interested in the facts the president cited to make his case.
What we found is one of the most misleading collections of assertions we have seen in a short presidential speech. Virtually every claim by the president regarding the auto industry needs an asterisk, just like the fine print in that too-good-to-be-true car loan.
Of course, if the Times did it, it would mean the End Times.
“Bone-Headed Beliefs”
Surely it’s time for climate-change deniers to have their opinions forcibly tattooed on their bodies.
Not necessarily on the forehead; I’m a reasonable man. Just something along their arm or across their chest so their grandchildren could say, ”Really? You were one of the ones who tried to stop the world doing something? And why exactly was that, granddad?”
On second thoughts, maybe the tattooing along the arm is a bit Nazi-creepy. So how about they are forced to buy property on low-lying islands, the sort of property that will become worthless with a few more centimetres of ocean rise, so they are bankrupted by their own bloody-mindedness?
Yes, that’s much more reasonable.
A Job (And Wealth) Creator, Not Destroyer
Draft Rick Perry for president?
How To Settle Space
NASA Comes To Its Senses
It looks like the “two-phase” approach to the Senate Launch System, which would have resulted in a rocket that flew only four times for billions per flight, is dead. The problem is, they still have to operate within the absurd design constraints imposed by the porkers on the Hill.
Going Galt
Obama tunes out, and business goes on a hiring strike:
After April 13 Obama Democrats went into campaign mode. They staged a poll-driven Senate vote to increase taxes on oil companies.
They began a Mediscare campaign against Ryan’s budget resolution that all but four House Republicans had voted for. That seemed to pay off with a special election victory in New York’s 26th Congressional District.
The message to job creators was clear. Hire at your own risk. Higher taxes, more burdensome regulation and crony capitalism may be here for some time to come.
I’m hoping for not more than another year and a half, until January, 2013. We’ll probably survive that long, though there will be a lot of unnecessary suffering. I don’t want to think about another five years of it.
The GM Bailout
A critique of the economic simplemindedness of its defenders. These people need to read Bastiat.
[Update later afternoon]
Todd Zywicki lays out the ugly story.
Back From Florida
But taking a day off to rest from my “vacation.”
Meanwhile, go read my CEI colleague Iain Murray’s thoughts on the hidden tax and the cost of federal regulations.