Lynne Kiesling Although the federal government is actually in a budget crisis and our elected so-called representatives claim to be dealing with it, they are acting rather like they are in denial, or still embroiled in such petty partisan bickering that they refuse to make difficult choices with short-run costs and long-run benefits. Take ethanol …
They Can’t Even Pull off the Ethanol Subsidy Repeal … Read More »
Lynne Kiesling As Jonathan Adler notes at the Volokh Conspiracy, the Wisconsin legislature is considering a piece of legislation that would change the regulations governing the production, wholesale distribution, and retail sale of beer in Wisconsin. The controversial provision in this legislation is one that prevents brewers from owning wholesale distributors, and the controversy arises …
Distortionary Effects of Three-tier Liquor Regulation, Wisconsin Edition Read More »
Michael Giberson The National Wildlife Federation and other environmental groups have been lobbying against the Keystone XL pipeline proposal as a sort of proxy battle against production of crude oil from Canadian tar sands. Robert Hahn and Peter Passell suggest that, as the tar sands will be developed whether or not the pipeline is built, …
Environmental Benefits from the Keystone Xl Pipeline Read More »
Lynne Kiesling If you have not caught Virginia Postrel in her new columnist gig at Bloomberg View, here’s a good chance, for Virginia’s column today is about U.S. federal light bulb regulation; both Mike and I have written about light bulb technology and the EISA 2007 “performance standard” that is leading to the disappearance of …
Lynne Kiesling If you want good examples of Schumpeterian competition, it doesn’t get much better than this: Amazon to take on Apple this summer with a Samsung-built tablet? The Engadget folks make … a very reasoned argument that paints Amazon, not Samsung or the rest of the traditional consumer electronics industry, as Apple’s chief competition …
Lynne Kiesling Researchers at PERC have been working on free-market environmentalism and property rights-based approaches to aligning economic and environmental values for decades. This video does an excellent job of highlighting the work that PERC scholars and others have done to make ocean fisheries more sustainable by moving from open-access overfishing to population and profit …
Michael Giberson The Texas state legislature has passed a bill that affirms that a light bulb manufactured in Texas of materials predominantly from within Texas and sold for use within Texas would not be subject to federal law or regulation under the authority of the U.S. Congress to regulate interstate commerce. The bill further would commit the state Attorney …
Lynne Kiesling Think about public policy concerning disaster relief — the typical argument is that government intervention is necessary to supply affected people with food, clothing, shelter, and construction resources. One theoretical foundation of this argument is the standard public good model, which shows that profit maximizing/utility maximizing individuals will not supply the optimal amount …
Michael Giberson Andrew Rice has a great little story in the New York Times Magazine on the upcoming phaseout of the incandescent light bulb. No, the incandescent bulb has not been “banned,” not exactly. It is just that, a few years ago, Congress agreed to raise energy efficiency standards for light bulbs effective January 1, …
Saying Goodbye to Edison’s Hot Little Light Bulb? Read More »
Michael Giberson Mostly oil and natural gas stories from around the web: The Hill’s E2-Wire, Oil industry: Response to leaks boosts case for pipeline – “The Obama administration’s swift response to leaks at the TransCanada pipeline boosts the case for approving an extension of the line, the oil industry argued Monday.” Logic is: sure the …
Copyright © 2022 Knowledge Problem Archive