I had earlier posted about the SNAFUed boondoggle also known as the Eastern span of the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge (here and here), but the bad news just keeps rolling in. Yesterday it was revealed that the tower supporting the entire self-anchored suspension bridge rests on bolts that are likely to fail, causing the...
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In the age of ceaseless parroting for “transparency,” it’s astounding to me that government do-gooders are apparently immune. The Asbury Park (NJ) Press is reporting: The Sandy relief fund chaired by New Jersey first lady Mary Pat Christie has raised more than $32 million so far. But four months after the superstorm, none of...
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Among the celebrants at the inaugural balls will be top contributors to the President’s reelection campaign, but their real celebration will be April 15, when they continue to be the beneficiaries of a “tax loophole” Obama pledged to close in 2008—but that remains gaping wide open despite his rhetoric about now making “the rich”...
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Which articles on the Independent Institute’s websites and blogs received the most views last year? We thought you might be wondering! To satisfy your curiosity, we’ve put together two lists—each one shedding light on what most attracts the attention of our Internet audience. The first list of “articles” includes blog posts from The Beacon...
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As the U.S. government prepared for and then engaged fully in World War II, it made increasingly stringent efforts to control inflation by imposing price controls. Late in 1942, these controls were strengthened substantially, and from early 1943 through mid-1946, when the controls were allowed to lapse, the consumer price index rose very little....
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William Binney, a mathematician who worked for the NSA for 32 years as a cryptographer, goes on the record to detail that the FBI’s going through General Petraeus’s email is no particular exception: all electronic communications of all Americans are under constant surveillance and are permanently stored so security agencies can look through them...
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The Daily Mail of London has reported that despite its support for global warming alarmism, Britain’s National Weather Service (U.K. Met Office) has quietly unveiled a report admitting that there has been no warming from January 1997 through August 2012. (Here also are the data sets for the report as well as an analysis...
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When the September unemployment figures were announced a month before the presidential election as having miraculously declined to below 8% for the first time since the current administration started, more than a few speculated that there may have been some book-cooking in the back room. In response, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, said she was...
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One of Nobel Laureate George Stigler’s best-known articles is his “The Theory of Economic Regulation,” in which he argues that over time, regulatory agencies that are designed to regulate industries for the public interest become “captured” by the industries they are supposed to regulate. Stigler’s “capture theory of regulation” concludes that regulators end up...
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I’ve been teaching economics for decades, and until 2008 I taught my students that the Federal Reserve Bank (Fed) engages in monetary policy through open market operations by buying and selling government securities. (They have other policy tools too.) They dealt in government securities partly because their operations would alter the money supply without...
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