Get ready for life in ultra small cars, shorn of spare tires and other unnecessary weight. The Obama administration has set the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards to 54.5 mpg! There will be fines (read: added costs) if you choose the wrong kind of vehicle or buy from an auto company that fails...
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Here is Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs speaking on “Ethanol Subsidies Have Many Bad Consequences,” from the Mises Circle seminar, “Agricultural Subsidies: Down on the D.C. Farm,” held May 14th in Indianapolis. Download audio file (27:51 minutes) Please also see the following books: Plowshares & Pork Barrels: The Political Economy of Agriculture, by...
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With Thanksgiving upon us once again, we offer a reminder of the economic lesson that made our first Thanksgiving possible: The Pilgrims’ Real Thanksgiving Lesson by Benjamin Powell Feast and football. That’s what many of us think about at Thanksgiving. Most people identify the origin of the holiday with the Pilgrims’ first bountiful harvest....
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It’s all over the news. “The recession is over.” The mainstream economists say so. This was the longest recession since World War II, I heard on the news (say, I thought the economy was just dandy throughout that war—oh, never mind). The end of this terrible recession into which the free market plunged us...
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A new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco confirms research by Independent Institute scholars that immigrants improve the U.S. economy as a whole, including employment prospects and wages for native-born Americans: total immigration to the United States from 1990 to 2007 was associated with a 6.6% to 9.9% increase in real...
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It’s not news that “Global warming” has been morphed into “Climate change” as global temperatures have failed to rise as predicted by climate alarmists of the 1990s. But the quoted reaction by the head of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to the most recent investigation into the IPCC’s methodology is...
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Here’s an illuminating passage from James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009): At a time when the state seems pervasive and inescapable, it is easy to forget that for much of history, living within or outside the state — or in...
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Syndicated columnist and bestselling author Dave Barry’s provides an incisive and hilarious, month-by-month review of the year 2009, “Dave Barry’s year in review: 2009.” As he begins: It was a year of Hope—at first in the sense of “I feel hopeful!” and later in the sense of “I hope this year ends soon!” It...
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That’s the title of a new book by Robert and Brenda Vale. I’m not sure if it is available in the U.S., but did find it on Amazon in the UK. Here is an article about the book. The book says your pet dog has a bigger carbon footprint than your SUV, even when...
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There was a certain horrifying fascination to observe the speed and enthusiasm with which conservatives embraced the unprecedented growth of government power and size under George W. Bush in the aftermath of 9/11. A Crisis and Leviathan case study in the “ratchet-effect” of “crises” — documented brilliantly throughout by Bob Higgs and reprinted as...
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