Independent Institute Research Director Alexander Tabarrok is interviewed here by Ray Lehmann on the FIRE (Finance, Insurance & Real Estate News) Podcast for the Heartland Institute. The interview discusses many government barriers that exist that block innovation and what policy reforms could be adopted now to restore entrepreneurship and prosperity. Issues addressed include patents...
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The following was nationally distributed in the United States by the Associated Press and appeared in the New York Daily News on Friday, November 4, 1949. The measures being referenced are those in the Fair Deal, the cradle-to-grave welfare state proposal of President Harry S Truman to follow up on Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal...
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In a recent podcast interview (please see below) of the economist Clifford F. Thies at Econ Journal Watch (EJW), he discusses the ideas and impact of Richard T. Ely (1854–1943), the highly influential “Progressive.” Ely was co-founder, first Secretary, and subsequent President of the American Economic Association (AEA), that continues to take great pride...
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As reported in The Guardian and elsewhere, a new batch of 5,000 emails (“FOIA2011″) has just been leaked that follow up on Climategate of 2009 and the more recent scandal of the BEST studies that further reveal the deliberate and coordinated efforts by key climate alarmist scientists to distort the scientific record in order...
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The following invocation was delivered by the Very Reverend Alan W. Jones, Dean Emeritus at Grace Cathedral of San Francisco, at the Independent Institute’s 25th Anniversary Dinner: A Gala for Liberty, November 15th, in San Francisco: INVOCATION We thank you that you have called the human family into freedom and shown us its painful...
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The New York Times reports in “A Gold Rush of Subsidies in Clean Energy Search” that NRG Energy is receiving nearly $1.6 billion in government subsidies for its new compound in California of almost one million solar panels. The Times further notes that: Similar subsidy packages have been given to 15 other solar- and...
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In the aftermath of the Solyndra cronyism debacle, the Los Angeles Times now reports that a no-bid contract was awarded last May to a firm controlled by a billionaire Obama supporter for the highly unlikely national security threat of a small pox attack: Over the last year, the Obama administration has aggressively pushed a...
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Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert “takes on” Occupy Wall Street in a hilarious yet actual segment with protest representatives from “the consensus within the press group,” Justin (“a male-bodied person”) and “Ketchup” (“a female-bodied person”), in a “Co-Optportunity” with what Colbert calls a cult, oh sorry, I mean “movement”.

This past week, most of the world’s major media, including The Economist, Washington Post, and Nature, reported uncritically the claims of global warming by Richard Muller of the University of California at Berkeley, director of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures project team (BEST), that has recently completed a series of four studies. However and in response...
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In the new hit album by pop-singer “Weird Al” Yankovic, Alpocalypse, he includes the song, “Party in the C.I.A.”, which is a parody of the hit song by Miley Cyrus, “Party in the U.S.A.”