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...
Read More »

My semester is over and I’ve just turned in my grades. One of the courses I taught this term was “History of Economic Ideas,” and one of my final examination questions asked students to compare the views of Karl Marx and Joseph Schumpeter with the Marshallian-neoclassical view on profit. These views are very relevant...
Read More »

Peter Klein’s post about the bizarro world in which the SEC prefers not to define insider trading too carefully, lest that definition cramp the government’s prosecutorial style, reminds me of the similarly vague definition of price fixing for purposes of enforcing the antitrust laws. The best acccount I have seen of this matter comes from R....
Read More »

Attention High-school Students & College Undergrads: Don’t let your intellect atrophy! Make summer vacation a time to delve into new subjects or to probe topics that have sounded intriguing to you. The Challenge of Liberty Summer Seminar explores economics, liberty, and society using lectures, discussion, directed reading, and multimedia presentations. Students consistently give our...
Read More »

Across the country, politicians are responding to the inability of a population devastated by government-induced recession to support governments’ spending at levels they have grown accustomed to by threatening the closure of schools, firehouses, and other high-profile, highly-valued government “services.” I have opined elsewhere on the reasons that such high-profile programs—rather than the thousands...
Read More »

Franklin Roosevelt biographer Conrad Black has a new article championing the 32nd president, and defending the man’s legacy against a number of critiques that have emerged since his time in office. This article comes at a time when many are demanding “another New Deal” and a resurgence in Rooseveltian governance in general. An interesting...
Read More »

In 2003, in the aftermath of 9/11, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was placed under the Department of Homeland Security. The disastrous aftermath of Hurricane Katrina two years later marked the first test of the new FEMA, and there is widespread agreement that the agency utterly failed. Much of the tragedy following Katrina...
Read More »

An oldie but goodie from the Onion, which every day becomes harder to distinguish from, say, the Washington Post. I owe Josh Wright the reminder. A nice complement to R. W. Grant’s Tom Smith and His Incredible Bread Machine, with its classic stanzas: Now let me state the present rules,” The lawyer then went...
Read More »

After seventeen months of deliberation, investigation, and debate, it appears that the federal government will finally allow satellite radio providers XM and Sirius to merge. The regulatory hurdles the companies had to overcome were ostensibly in place to protect consumers, but the effect of the regulations were to waste resources and delay a merger...
Read More »