I am leaving tomorrow to teach in a week-long economics program for college students in the Republic of Georgia. Georgia was one of the Soviet republics until the Soviet Union dissolved 21 years ago, and the country has made remarkable strides in the two decades since. After a slow start, Georgia instituted major economic...
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The elevated freeway that collapsed during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in Oakland had long been known to be non-seismically-sound. Engineering students at nearby University of California, Berkeley were directed to the structure as a case-study in negative harmonics, and we who drove on it regularly were well familiar with the almost seasickening wavy...
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Emails released last week between representatives of major pharmaceutical companies (“big Pharma”) and top Obama administration officials, including White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, reveal insider-dealing sufficient to kill any remaining Hope that Obamacare was designed to deliver on the promises of its official name: there is no Patient Protection or Affordable Care...
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No issue during the recent financial crisis aroused more passion than the bailouts of large banks and other financial institutions. Polls conducted during the peak of the crisis in September 2008 revealed that the American public overwhelmingly objected to the bailouts. Yet, although numerous books and articles have reported on the crisis, few have...
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Florida State Senator John Thrasher has introduced a bill into the Florida legislature that would ban state college and university employees from being state legislators. As a professor myself, I found Thrasher’s bill interesting (but I assure you I have no inclination to run for any government office). Senator Thrasher’s concern is that legislators...
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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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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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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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Economic “stimulus” packages that don’t revive the economy and that increase federal deficits and undermine private investment and job growth? Check. Laws meant to protect endangered species but which incentivize landowners who have them on their property to “shoot, shovel, and shut-up”? Check. Anti-poverty programs that foster dependency and hinder participation in the job...
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As did many, former Mayor Willie Brown wrote a tribute of Steve Jobs in his San Francisco Chronicle column this week. Except, in inimitable Willie Brown fashion, his was rather more a tribute to himself—an accolade to Brown’s magnanimous use of his discretionary power to make a San Francisco Apple store possible. It seems...
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