Category: Featured

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Featured · Internet/Telecom · Legal Affairs

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The New Rent Seeking?

According to data released this week, Samsung and Apple make up the majority of the top 20 global smartphone models sold in the first quarter of 2014. While that success demonstrates the robust market prowess of these smartphone manufacturers, the real winners are the customers, getting more services, better products and lower prices. Almost the exact opposite happens when companies resort to lawsuits to gain market advantage, a sort of rent seeking via the courts.

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Featured · Media

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Media Ignorance Is Worse When It’s Intentional

I hope you all took time to read Mollie Hemingway’s piece this week concerning the problem of media ignorance. The really troublesome aspect of it, as I see it, is not when people are unintentionally ignorant of the matters they cover, which is of course excusable. No one is expected to be an expert on everything they write about, and in practice, it just serves to foster the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, which you have surely experienced regularly if you are an expert in something and a consumer of media. Yes, it’s a problem when those youngsters in media who got promoted because they are really good at the Instagram don’t know about something because it’s on the second page of the Google results. But leaving something you didn’t know out of a story is more excusable than asserting something inaccurate out of ignorance, which is still more excusable than purposefully putting on blinders and ignoring anything that conflicts with your thesis because you’d rather not engage it. It’s one thing to not knowanother perspective exists – it’s another to purposefully pretend it doesn’texist.

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Economics · Education · Featured · Government

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“Free” College is a Dangerous Pipe-Dream

College education has more and more been described by the political left as a right to which citizens ought to be entitled. This view has been popularized among left-leaning students, many of whom are energized by ruinously expensive college loans. They clamor for the “fair solution”, namely that the government should pay for all of it. The effort to make college a right is a disastrous proposition. It is a dangerous pipe-dream that could devastate an already rickety higher education sector. There are problems with the way student loans and college fees operate at present, but this is not the way to fix it.

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Liberty Weeping

Featured · Government · Liberty · Politics

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Liberty and Freedom Under Fire

Most Americans would agree that liberty and freedom are values fundamental to our nation, but, if questioned, do they really know the intent of their meanings, or have they changed through time? David Hackett in his book,Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideas, shows how liberty and freedom form an intertwined strand that runs through the core of American life. But like DNA, liberty and freedom have been transformed and recombined with every generation. Hence, the earliest colonies shared ideals of liberty and freedom may have evolved into different meanings today.

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Economics · Featured

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Food Prices Are Soaring And Washington Doesn’t Care

Today’s economy is driven by Washington in more than just determining the location of Maserati dealerships. We see the ramifications of current government policies in numerous obvious ways. Make full-time employment more expensive with required benefits, and suddenly there are more part-time jobs; provide ample benefits and low eligibility standards for defining disabled workers, and suddenly there are more long-term unemployed going on SSDI; keep interest rates at zero, and suddenly there are more elderly workers; end unemployment insurance, and suddenly you see people accepting jobs they were reluctant to take; and as we’ve seen at the state and local level, raise the minimum wage, and suddenly teens are struggling to find work.

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Featured · FIRE

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Dispersing Millennials

The very centers of urban cores in many major metropolitan areas are experiencing a resurgence of residential development, including new construction in volumes not seen for decades. There is a general impression, put forward by retro–urbanists and various press outlets that the urban core resurgence reflects a change in the living preferences of younger people – today’s Millennials – who they claim are rejecting the suburban and exurban residential choices of their parents and grandparents.

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Featured · Government · Politics

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Building a Libertarian Paradise

Prominent libertarians have been making the news with various proposals to build libertarian paradises free of government control. Venture capitalist Peter Thiel has perhaps been the most vocal, with his support for building floating free cities in international waters well known. While such grand visions may be possible to achieve, they are still a ways off from fruition. If you are looking for a libertarian refuge in the here-and-now, however, there is a place for you to go: New Hampshire.

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ICCC9 Crowd Shot Plenary Sesssion

Environment/Energy · Featured · Media · Science

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Informing a Slate Reporter About Heartland’s Climate Skeptic Conference

Unlike the alarmists — who all sing in perfect harmony about man-caused climate calamity from the group-think hymnal — the scientists who speak at our conferences don’t all agree on everything. That’s the nature of bringing together scientists who study the climate from diverse disciplines. That’s healthy for science, as well as the goal of advancing greater public understanding of what is actually happening to the climate.

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Environment/Energy · Featured · Government · Regulation

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ICCC Panel 8 – Costs and Benefits of Renewable Energy

Panel 8 of the 9th International Conference on Climate Change was on the subject of “Costs and Benefits of Renewable Energy.” The panel was focused on the subject of renewable energy, specifically the high cost and potentially devastating economic consequences produced by the federal government’s efforts to replace the current energy sources with renewables.

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Featured · Government · Legal Affairs · Politics

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The Pied Piper of Permisos

It’s beginning to sink in with the intelligentsia: The flood of illegal aliens (yes, I said “illegal”) and particularly the tsunami of children traveling alone — parents risking their youngsters’ lives by sending them from Central America through gang-ravaged Mexico — threatens to turn the immigration debate into a major political liability for Democrats in November.

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Economics · Featured · Government · Regulation

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Garth Brooks in Ireland: A Tale of Bureaucratic Insanity

A cautionary tale about the pitfalls of bureaucratic incompetence played out in Ireland over the last several days. American country music star Garth Brooks was scheduled to play five concerts in the Croke Park arena, one of the largest venues in the country. In all, 400,000 tickets were sold. That is an astonishing number, considering Ireland’s population is just under 4.6 million. Close to one in ten citizens was planning to attend!

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Environment/Energy · Featured

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ICCC9 Panel 3 – Combating Climate Myths with Science Facts

Day two of the 9th International Conference on Climate Change was stacked with qualified speakers discussing a wide range of subjects relating to global warming. Panel 3, titled “Combating Climate Myths with Science Facts, featured three speakers, Tom Harris, Anthony Watts and James Taylor. These three men spoke about the causes of the hysteria that swirls around the topic of climate change and how to push back against it.

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Featured · Government · Legal Affairs · Politics

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It’s Time to Ratify the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty

The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) outlaws the testing of nuclear weapons. So far, 183 countries signed the treaty, but it cannot become a binding international law until it has been ratified by all states capable of developing nuclear weapons, of which there are 44 specified in the treaty. Of these states, three (India, Pakistan, and North Korea) have not signed the treaty, and a further six (China, Egypt, Israel, Iran, and the United States) are yet to ratify it.

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