Do Smart People Make Markets Tick?
Most market advocates believe that what's good about the marekts is that they reward merit. But I argue in my latest Forbest column that markets don't reward merit, they reward value. And the failure...
View ArticleA National Infrastructure Bank Is a Good Idea, In Theory
In recent weeks, the idea of a National Infrastructure Bank has gained new momentum. It has been endorsed in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by the president’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. The group...
View ArticleNational Infrastructure Bank: Can Congress Structure It Properly?
My Public Works Financing column is up:In recent weeks, the idea of a National Infrastructure Bank has gained new momentum. It has been endorsed in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by the president’s...
View ArticleNet Neutrality Means No More iPhones
The Reason Foundation releases my policy brief today looking at the effect network neutrality regulation will have on wireless applications and services.Much has been written about the deleterious...
View ArticleTransit's Dependency on Cars
Ed Braddy's latest column at New Geography points out some crucial interdependence. For starters,Yet in pursuing this transit-friendly future political leaders rarely confront this inescapable reality:...
View ArticleThe Right's Top 25 Journalists
The DailyBeast puts Reason's Nick Gillespie on this list. Not sure why he would be considered a journalist of the right. If anything Nick is a left-libertarian. But then, see, that is the thing with...
View ArticleFormer NSW Premier Bob Carr on Mobilizing Private Capital for Infrastructure
Reason Foundation's Innovators in Action 2009features an article by former New South Wales (Australia) Premier Bob Carr (PDF version here) in which he describes how his administration embraced...
View ArticleDon't Break the Banks
Reason.com When Joseph Olear opened his renovated Three Point Bowling Center in south Orlando last May he didn’t anticipate Wachovia taking an ax to his line of credit. Yet three months later the bank...
View ArticleThe Fable of Market Meritocracy
It's a good thing that French President Nicolas Sarkozy is brimming with amour-propre because he certainly did not earn any amour from the business elite gathered in Davos last month. In a bombastic...
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Reading a Sculpture
Jens Galschiot’s Survival of the Fattest, displayed in Copenhagen Harbor during the global climate conference, features an obese Justitia on the shoulders of a frail African. There’s an inscription:...
View ArticlePassing ObamaCare Won't Make It More Popular
Given the long, steep nosedive President Barack Obama's health care reform proposal's popularity has taken since last summer—Pollster.com's multi-poll average now shows opposition at 51.1 percent, with...
View ArticleBoskin on the Problems of a High Debt to GDP Ratio
From yesterday's WSJ:The deficits are so large relative to GDP that the debt/GDP ratio keeps growing and then explodes as entitlement costs accelerate in subsequent decades. So worrisome is this debt...
View ArticleCNN Looks at Government Pension Crisis
CNN reports on the growing problem with over-generous and unsustainable government worker pensions. My favorite part is the interview with the city sanitation worker who to the job because he wanted...
View ArticleWhere Privatization Needs to Be Improved
Froma Stateline article "Making IT Work",An estimated 85 percent of government IT projects fail to come in on-time, on-budget or both. “The IT project road is littered with failure, cost-overrun,...
View ArticleLet the Private Sector Compete to Provide Public Services and Watch the...
San Diego Union-Tribune San Diego should consider a budget reform that has proved to be a successful strategy at all levels of government â?? namely, introducing competition to provide government...
View ArticleTARP Watchdog Warns of Moral Hazard
Catching up on some news reading. From back on January 31:The Troubled Assets Relief Program, known as TARP, has not addressed the problems that led to the last crisis and in some case those problems...
View ArticleObama Spurns Gun Control
Among the many groups that opposed Barack Obama's presidential race, few were more certain or vehement than gun rights organizations. "Barack Obama would be the most anti-gun president in American...
View ArticleThe EPAâ??s Carbon Footprint
On December 7, as delegates from around the world gathered in Copenhagen for the United Nations climate conference, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson announced that her...
View ArticleThe Presidential Commission on Birth, Death, and the Meaning of Life
In November, President Barack Obama issued an executive order establishing a new Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. He appointed political scientist and University of...
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Congressâ?? Phony Price Tags
Congress says that the health care package it passed at the end of 2009 will cost roughly $900 billion over 10 years—and will somehow end up saving taxpayers money in the long run. If you think that...
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