Today, a U.S. District Court in Florida held that the individual mandate found in the Obamacare law is an unconstitutional use of the Commerce power. Judge Roger Vinson emphasized that this was not a decision on the wisdom of the law, but solely whether Congress has the power to pass it. If we accept the expansive interpretation...
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Texas A&M University, which is a more or less legitimate institution of higher education, harbors something called The Bush School of Government and Public Service. Don’t laugh; it’s true. Today, one of my Facebook friends posted a publicity photo, which I take to be part of the school’s efforts either to attract students or...
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In a poll of business executives following Tuesday’s State of the Union speech, the Wall Street Journal finds most remain skeptical of President Obama’s new, business-friendly rhetoric, and confirmed that his policies to date account for the continued economic malaise. As encapsulated by Anthony Guzzi, CEO of Emcor Group Inc., a construction and facilities-services...
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President Obama did not offer much in the way of specifics in his State of the Union address this week, so one thing that did stand out was his specific recommendation that we lower the tax rate on corporate income. A Republican response to the president’s speech was given by Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan,...
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In yesterday’s New York Times appears an op-ed article by Edward L. Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard. Glaeser’s article is remarkable because arguments in favor of freedom, insisting that economic analysis implicitly rests on a moral presumption that individual freedom has fundamental value, do not appear every day—or every month—in “the newspaper...
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In the run-up to President Obama’s “State of the Union” address this evening, the nation’s monetary and fiscal policymakers seem, as often is true, to be working at cross-purposes. According to reports published in The Wall Street Journal yesterday (January 24, 2011), Chairman Ben Bernanke at long last has concluded that the Fed should...
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The Great Depression has been a deeply contested subject from the very beginning. After John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory became sacred writ for most mainstream economists, Keynesian interpretations generally prevailed, notwithstanding pockets of resistance among older economists, in general, and Austrian school economists, in particular. Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s monumental Monetary History of...
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As Congress and the President consider yet another set of “reforms” for the federal income tax code, taxpayers should encourage them to heed the words of one of the first and greatest economists. In Book V, Chapter II, Part II of The Wealth of Nations (Modern Library, Cannan ed., p. 778), Adam Smith wrote...
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After the shooting that killed six and wounded at least a dozen people, including Arizona Representative Gabrielle Giffords, I blogged about the accusations that extreme political rhetoric was to blame for the shooting. In passing I also remarked “...that news accounts are calling Loughner a ‘suspect’ in the shooting, when after the shooting people took...
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Fact: The USA is in the midst of a obesity epidemic. Fact: Fat people are more likely to need health services, work fewer years, and pay less in taxes. They “free ride” by consuming scarce health care resources paid for by those who are healthy and thin. PROPOSAL: For their own good, and for...
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