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Free markets

• 03.11.10
  Obama panders to special interests
  Free markets (0)

  Don Bordreaux at Cafe Hayek says: A headline in today’s Wall Street Journal reads “Obama Details Effort to Double Exports Over Five Years.” Translation: “Obama Details Effort to Increase Corporate Welfare Over Five Years.” Or more loosely paraphrased, "Obama panders to special interests."
  
  
• 06.14.09
  Colin Powell and Larry Summers
  Free markets, Words from President Obama (0)

  George Bush had his Colin Powell, and now Barak Obama has his Larry Summers. Colin Powell sacrificed his integrity to give an eloquent speech at the UN, assuring the world of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's weapon's of mass destruction. He of course had lots of doubts about it even as he spoke. And now Larry Summers has told has said President Obama is a defender of free markets. President Barack Obama's chief economist on Friday defended White House economic policies against criticism that they amounted to "a kind of back-door socialism." In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations ...
  
  
• 06.08.09
  Scalper bites Leviathan’s Ankle
  Free markets, Leviathan Ankle-Biter (0)

  I posted this in the comments section of a WSJ article titled "Going 'Paperless' to Thwart Scalpers." I love scalpers, too. They don't suck anyone's blood. They don't steal anything. I decide if I like the asking price, and if so, I pay it. If not, not. Usually it's not, because my wife doesn't want me spending a lot of money on tickets for sporting events, even though she's the sports fan in the family. But once in a while I make use of a scalper's services. It's unlike Obama's cars, where you have to pay whether or not you want ...
  
  
• 05.28.09
  How to reward failure
  Free markets, Regulation (0)

  Last week we learned that Shell stockholders voted down an executive compensation plan. (WSJ: "Shell investors revolt over executive pay plan.") They did not want to reward the managers of their company for failure. It was just a non-binding resolution, though. As at many business corporations, the Shell company executives have managed to keep their paychecks insulated from the workings of the free market by not allowing the owners to control them. I don't know just how that state of affairs came about, but I would wager that the executives of this and other business ...
  
  
• 05.14.09
  Yevsei Liberman
  Free markets (1)

  A few days ago I finished Sergei Khrushchev's book, "Nikita Khrushchev and the creation of a superpower." I wish he had had as much to say about the Soviet Union's domestic economy as he did about missiles and the space race. Maybe I'll find some of that in his other books, though I it's understandable where his emphasis lay given that his own job was in the missile industry. He does give some tantalizing descriptions of how industrial planning worked in the 1950s and 1960s. And he provides plenty of evidence that his father understood very well ...
  
  
• 03.21.09
  Successful shopping expedition
  Free markets (0)

  My Kensington Pocket Mouse broke the other day, so tonight I sat down to order one of those Logitech Nano mice. I wanted the tiny USB receiver so I could put it in my notebook computer and leave it there, without worrying about breaking it off when I move around. But I learned that the mice are not full-sized. For some reason neither Kensington nor Logitech puts mouse dimensions on their web site, but I was able to find some reviewers who had measured the things. The Logitech Nano 550 is bigger ...
  
  
• 12.18.08
  Geniuses who want your retirement savings
  Free markets (2)

  It's bad enough that one of these years I'll have to retire from my day job. But to make it worse, there is the existence of things such as Boston College's "Center for Retirement Research." That in itself isn't the worst of it. The worst is that it's led by a director, Alicia Munnell, who has this to say in last weekend's WSJ: The 401(k) system has had a chance, and in my view, it has failed. As a major shource of retirement income, it has shown itself unreliable--a point the financial crisis has driven home. For ...
  
  
• 12.04.08
  Quotes for 5 December 2008
  Bash the Messenger, Free markets (0)

  Bailing the bailout If he was serious about this, Hank Paulson would be escorted from Washington by U.S. marshals. ... Mr. Bush, I had thought you were actually going to do what you said you were going to do with the $700 billion. You did not do it; your Treasury Secretary continues to audible at the line of scrimmage. --Economist King Banion of SCSU Scholars, 13 November 2008 Interactive learning How does "a virtual learning environment" differ from "interactive learning" (what learning isn't "interactive", come to that)... --Sam Leith at Telegraph.co.uk 25 November 2008 Upcoming fad: blogs without headlines The judge ruled that since the blog ...
  
  
• 10.07.08
  Patience for us but not for them
  Free markets, Regulation (0)

  Bush says we need to be patient. "It's going to take a while." So why was he so impatient last week? Why the big hurry to pass something, anything, even if it was all larded up with more of the same poison that sickened the economy in the first place? Why couldn't we have taken a while to examine the causes of the financial crisis and come up with measures that would actually address it?
  
  
• 07.16.08
  Fannie Medicare
  Free markets (0)

  Monday evening I listened to an NPR radio program about the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac crisis. There was talk about "How we got into this mess." I didn't hear it all the way to the end, but I'll bet the program never got around to considering that the current Congressional behavior with respect to Medicare funding also explains how we got into the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac mess.
  
  

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