Very funny column, but the underlying message is quite depressing: Last Thursday, the California Occupational Safety and Health Standards Board voted to set up a committee to examine whether condoms should be required on all pornographic film shoots. California has run out of money, but it hasn’t yet run out of things to regulate. For […]

Kudos to the federal appeals court that just ruled that the Federal Reserve has no right to hide the sordid special handouts it provided to well-connected financial firms. Here’s an excerpt from a report about the decision: The Federal Reserve Board must disclose documents identifying financial firms that might have collapsed without the largest U.S. […]

While the politicians in Washington are poised to undermine the healthcare system with additional layers of taxes, spending, and regulation, Steven Chapman proposes to use markets to improve a part of the system that is suffering from a punitive form of price controls. Orgain donors are allowed zero compensation for their sacrifice. This policy – […]

I don’t think the number of doctors leaving the profession will come anywhere close to this level, but polling data reported by the New England Journal of Medicine is another indication of the dangers of letting politicians get even more power over the health care system. The politicians will still get quality care, but average […]

My Cato colleague Jose Pinera makes a powerful argument for “privatizing” Social Security, which is something that has happened in about 30 nations. My Ph.D. dissertation was on Australia’s private system, so I’ve always had a soft spot for this issue. Sadly, Washington is busy creating new entitlements instead of fixing the ones we already […]

We’ve already addressed this issue, but this story is even more amusng. I’ll resist the need for any (additional) awful puns, and I’ll even admit I don’t know for sure that these…um…services are financed by taxpayers (but that must be true since we’re talking about the Netherlands, right?). But is this really such a big […]

I had to laugh when I saw this article linked on the Drudge Report. Does Obama really think that Democratics in the House will be intimidated by a threat not to campaign for them? Look what wonders Obama did campaigning for Corzine in New Jersey and Coakley in Massachusetts. If he can’t boost Democrats in […]

The Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that the so-called stimulus generated jobs and growth. I addressed some of the profound shortcomings in CBO’s Keynesian model in a previous post, pointing out that the model is structured to produce certain results regardless of what happens in the real world. Interestingly, the Director of the CBO, Doug Elmendorf, basically […]

When Dorothy and her friends finally reach Oz, they present themselves to the almighty Wizard, only to eventually discover that he is just an illusion maintained by a charlatan hiding behind a curtain. This seems eerily akin to the state of Keynesian economics. It does not matter that Keynesianism isn’t working for Obama. It does not matter […]