To follow up on my earlier posting, “The Climate-Industrial Complex,” award-winning meteorologist Brian Sussman has a helpful, new article at American Thinker, “Carbon Cronyism: Why Cap-and-Trade Is Not Dead Yet.” Author of the new book, Climategate: A Veteran Meteorologist Exposes the Global Warming Scam, Sussman details some of the key, interlocking business and government...
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That’s what Paul Volker says in this interview. I don’t always find myself in agreement with Mr. Volker, but he’s surely got it right in his assessment of Fannie and Freddie. An excerpt: “The mortgage market now is almost a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States government. Almost all the mortgages made now...
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A new study from Pepperdine University’s Davenport Institute has exposed the fraud continually perpetuated upon the taxpaying public—and visited upon the poor families trapped in criminally failed government schools—that if the state (in this case, California) just had more money it could deliver a good education. The study concludes that, notwithstanding all the talk...
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From a political point of view, it seems crazy that President Obama has agreed — no, demanded — to turn an adversarial relationship between gulf coast residents and BP into an adversarial relationship between gulf coast residents and the president’s administration.

Christopher Coyne and I are working on a couple of papers and a short book about the Memphis riot of 1866. The first paper appeared in the Mercatus Center’s Working Papers Series today and is available here; the second paper and the book manuscript will be available...sometime. One of the general themes that’s emerging...
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This week’s Lighthouse (available online here) touches on the Gulf oil gusher (William F. Shughart II); political reform in Cuba (Alvaro Vargas Llosa); F. A. Hayek on the limits of constitutional design (Scott A. Boykin); and Israel’s blockade of Gaza (Ivan Eland). Here are links to the individual items: 1. How to Prevent an...
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As with everything else about the U.S. police state that is often associated with Republicans and the right, the Obama administration has pushed the envelope and showed itself to be as draconian as Bush. Deportations of illegal aliens—as in, people without the federal government’s permission to be here—have increased under Obama, including deportations of...
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Jeff Tucker points out how truly astounding internet language translation technology is. This is how truly unbelievable our world is: we can get automatic translations via the Google Labs “translate this message” command, and people barely notice. In her ongoing series of books on the Bourgeois Era, Deirdre McCloskey argues that one of the...
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Back in February 2008, I satirized George W. Bush’s $150 billion stimulus checks in “The Power of Numbers: Simplify! Simplify! I broke down the costs of Big Government for a family of four and showed how pitifully small $150 billion was in comparison to the $5 trillion then spent by local, state and federal governments....
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Angelo M. Codevilla, professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University, has written an extraordinary essay for the July/August issue of The American Spectator. It’s called “America’s Ruling Class – And the Perils of Revolution,” but it deals much more extensively with the anatomy and functioning of the class system in the United States...
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