Under the Government’s Wing
Without going into details, I’ll say that I’ve got reason to be especially averse to news about exorbitant salaries for banking executives, but the international structure for market dictation that they’re proposing to build to control the salaries of the ultra-rich will prove to be a ratcheting constrictor: The treasury secretary said the G-20 countries…
Stephen Moses, Health Care Policy Fellow for the Ocean State Policy Research Institute, brings to light an easy to miss loss of state dollars: In 1993, the federal government made it mandatory for state Medicaid programs to recover the cost of benefits paid to older people with exempt (sheltered) assets out of their estates. In…
Doug Kendall’s argument in favor of tight campaign finance controls on corporations is, essentially, that corporations are too rich and powerful (and thus would have too much ability to “buy” elections), and that the freedoms listed in the Constitution and Bill of Rights are designed for individuals, not corporations: In his historic run to the…
A couple of things that I’ve read, recently, reinforce a healthy concern about the sheer size of the aggregated pool of power that a growing government creates and the incentives that it generates. The first example comes from an article by Kevin Williamson in National Review about Congressman Barney Frank (subscription required): Fannie Mae and…
Stephen Spruiell over at The Corner on National Review brings up something that has troubled me for a while: green jobs cannot exist outside of the vacuum of government subsidies and mandates. In fact, he points out that their survival is dubious even with such props and cudgels. To buy into the “green jobs” scam,…
Cardinal George Pell, of Sydney, is entirely correct that “part of the logic in attacking the freedom of the church to serve others is to undermine the witness these services give to powerful Christian convictions.” Providing, say, adoption services in Massachusetts is thus defined not as something done out of religious conviction, but a secular…
Does anybody else see imaginary warning signs whenever news media convey urgency related to the swine flu and its predicted resurgence with the resumption of school? Parents and non-parents alike do well to pay attention to developments on the H1N1 front, but before leaping onto the latest and greatest protections, all should seek context like…
In 2007, President Hugo Chavez shut down a television station that was critical of him. Less than a month ago, he ordered the shut down of thirty four radio stations for the “crime” of belonging to the “bourgeoisie”. (Golf enthusiasts, check out what else is “bourgeoisie” and had to be shut down in Venezuela a…
It doesn’t take a stethoscope to hear the reckless “what could it hurt” beat behind the creation of a “pay czar“: Q: So what happens Thursday? A: Thursday is the last day the companies can submit proposed pay packages for the 25 highest earners at each one. At least one company, General Motors, said Tuesday…
First things first, Grafton Willey deserves a round of applause for speaking truth: “This is a deep recession which we worked hard in Rhode Island to get into. We have to take a long-term recovery view,” said Willey, who is also a managing director of CBIZ Tofias, a CPA firm with offices in Providence and…
