Michael Giberson Astonishing. What Thomas Friedman wrote in the New York Times, that is. One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people … it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies… Astonishing, because while …
Thomas Friedman Wants to Make the Policy Trains Run on Time Read More »
Michael Giberson Miriam Cherry and Robert Rogers explore the interaction of “Prediction Markets and the First Amendment.” If prediction markets are “expressive,” does that mean that U.S. government actions that constrain prediction market development potentially raise First Amendment issues on free speech grounds? The authors propose a way forward in which courts, at least until …
Does “Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is” Make Betting a Free Speech Issue? Read More »
Michael Giberson The office of the attorney general of the state of New York announced yesterday that a total of 16 … wait, make that 17 wind power companies have signed onto the state’s new “Wind Industry Ethics Code.” The news release indicates that the main point of the industry “ethics code” is to prohibit …
Michael Giberson I have a longish guest post, “Windpower: Focusing the Criticism Away from NIMBYism and Aesthetics,” up at Master Resource, Rob Bradley’s free market energy blog. In general, in the post I offer advice to free-market-oriented critics of wind power, urging them to focus on the distortionary policy problems and to stay away from …
Lynne Kiesling Two posts I’ve read this morning about health care resonate for me in combination. The first was Russ Roberts’ discussion of his conversation with a new Walmart employee about wages and benefits, where he notes that I didn’t get to ask her if she had health care coverage at either job. But the …
Health Care Policy, Individual Consumption Portfolios, and Liberty Read More »
Lynne Kiesling In his usual trenchant way, Jonathan Adler has hit upon the two things to which I object the most in the Waxman-Markey bill and vote. The first is the one about which I wrote in May: despite all of the tooth-gnashing and knicker-twisting about the cap-and-trade portions of the bill, the really egregious …
Transparency and Representation in the Waxman-Markey Vote Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Having just returned from a 1.5-week, three-conference trip, I am having my now-usual visceral reaction to the thought of another airport experience — nausea, which I hope diminishes by the time of my next trip in early August. Thus I’m in violent (irony intended) agreement with a post on Bruce Schneier’s blog today …
Lynne Kiesling I am in violent agreement with my friend Todd Zywicki’s commentary in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal on the Obama administration’s actions in the Chrysler bankruptcy. In particular, By stepping over the bright line between the rule of law and the arbitrary behavior of men, President Obama may have created a thousand new failing …
Todd Zywicki: the Commerce Clause is in the Constitution for a Reason Read More »
Michael Giberson Occasionally we hear from readers curious about the blog name, “knowledge problem.” Edmund Phelps explains the knowledge problem in an excellent essay that appeared in the Financial Times. (Registration may be required for FT.com; the essay is also posted in full at the FT‘s Capitalism blog.) Joseph Schumpeter’s early theory proposed that a …
Michael Giberson “Twitter marks an advance in freedom,” or at least so says Peder Zane in his column at the Raliegh News & Observer. I wouldn’t know, since I still don’t drink from the fountain of tweets. Only, I happened to notice at the end of an essay by Amartya Sen in the New York …
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