Under the Government’s Wing
This is interesting (subscription needed): You don’t have to be a scholar to know that congressional chairmen bring home the pork. But researchers at Harvard Business School, working with decades’ worth of data, put a number on it: Earmarked spending targeted at a specific state increases by about 40 percent when one of that state’s…
A half inch piece of plastic. H/T WPRO’s John Depetro; kudos to WPRI Eyewitness News for exposing this palpable danger (or something) to the students of Tiogue School: Eight-year-old David Morales says he made the camouflage hat with army men on top, as a school project. The hat was more than just a fashion statement,…
Bringing his military eye to the topic, Theodore Gatchel provides an astute summary of the Obama movement in government: Two competing schools of thought have developed. One holds that the government’s role should be one of educating people about the risks so that they can make informed decisions. The other school holds that the issues…
It could just be that I’m in my annual phase of presummer burnout, or it could be an indication of the complexity that Big Government imposes on a democratic society — to such degree that it ceases to be possible for the individuals who comprise that democracy to function as they must — but the…
The problem with giving government authority over everything is that, well, it gives government authority over everything. For a shocking example, consider Mark Steyn’s description of a minor controversy in Great Britain. It seems that, in the course of the recent election cycle, the then-ruling Labour party sent out postcards warning that, if victorious, the…
The financial regulation legislation — which has passed both houses and is awaiting reconciliation — hasn’t raised the ire that healthcare did before it. Several factors come play into that dynamic no doubt: financial regulation is less tangible, Wall Street makes a better villain than insurance companies, folks are tired from the healthcare skirmish, and…
What defines an economic bubble? There are probably technical answers to that question, perhaps even involving percentages and such, but the basic inference is an apparent growth that’s really just full of air, deceiving people into behaving as if the cause of the increase is actually something of substance when, in reality, it could dissipate…
I’m not sure one has to be a conspiracy theorist to think that government policies have become little more than a series of scams perpetrated on the American people. Take Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top concoction. Sure, there’s some favorable nods in the direction of reform and school choice, but those…
Senator Carl Levin (D, MI) strode right past the fundamental problem while lambasting Goldman Sachs executives (emphasis added): Wall Street is on the wrong side of this fight. It insists that reining in that — those excesses would unduly restrict the free market that is the engine of American progress. But this — this market…
Sometimes, just after waking in the morning, it’s possible to believe that people like this do not actually exist, but they’re out there, they’re more plentiful than is good for our nation’s health, and they seem to be getting bolder and bolder: If State Assemblyman Felix Ortiz has his way, the only salt added to…