We all expect to pay a price for missing deadlines—fail to pay a ticket on time, and you may find a warrant out for your arrest. But the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can apparently miss deadlines with impunity.
Economics · Featured · Liberty
Forty years ago, on December 11, 1974, Austrian economist, Friedrich A. Hayek, formally received that year’s Nobel Prize in Economics at the official ceremonies in Stockholm, Sweden. He delivered a lecture called, “The Pretense of Knowledge,” which forcefully challenged all those who believe that government has the wisdom or ability to successfully plan the economic affairs of society.
Google’s latest misdirection ploy is to focus the media and the new EC on its new “peak” PR narrative that its search and Android dominance is at a “peak” — with the implication that Google’s market position is fleeting and will only go down from here because fast-changing innovation and competition will naturally supplant it.
Thirty states, including Ohio, have renewable portfolio mandates. These laws require a certain percentage of electricity to be generated from renewable sources, primarily wind and solar power.
The United States is more than four years into the Obamacare experiment, and it appears Americans of all ideological persuasions are going to be disappointed by the results.
Suppose that there was a button in front of you that if you pushed it would, in one instant, abolish all the governmental controls and regulations on the U.S. economy. Would you push that button, and transform America into a society of free men associating with each other on the basis of voluntary exchange, with government limited to protection of life, liberty and honestly acquired property?
What is far and away the most important global trade commodity? Food. People have to eat. Before the world’s peoples can afford to purchase from us an iPhone, or a Ford pickup truck – they have to buy (hopefully our) food.
Champagne wishes and caviar dreams are coming true thanks to a government policy called net metering, which allows wealthy environmentalists who have installed solar panels on their roofs to profit unfairly at the expense of economically-disadvantaged people who can’t afford the technology themselves.
Finally, there is credible housing affordability data from China. For years, analysts have produced “back of the envelope” anecdotal calculations that have been often as inconsistent as they have been wrong. The Economist has compiled an index of housing affordability in 40 cities, which uses an “average multiple” (average house price divided by average household income) (China Index of Housing Affordability). This is in contrast to the “median multiple,” which is the median house price divided by the median household income (used in the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and other affordability indexes). The Demographia Survey rates affordability in 9 geographies, including Hong Kong (a special administrative region of China). The average multiple for a metropolitan market is generally similar to the median multiple.
New York City was the first major city to ban vaping, the use of e-cigarettes, wherever cigarette smoking is banned. Cities around the country have followed suit.
Forty years ago, on October 9, 1974, the Nobel Prize committee announced that the co-recipient of that year’s award for economics was the Austrian economist, Friedrich A. Hayek. Never was there a more deserving recognition for one of the truly great free market thinkers of modern times.
Back in 1997, then-FCC Chairman Reed Hundt titled a speech, “Thinking About Why Some Communications Mergers Are Unthinkable.” In his address, Mr. Hundt explained why, in his view, it was “unthinkable” to contemplate a merger between AT&T and one of the Bell Operating Companies. A principal reason had to do with what Mr. Hundt claimed would be the “resulting concentration” of “the long distance market.”
Economics · Featured · Government
One of the great fallacies arrogantly believed in by those in political power is the notion that they can know enough to manage and command the lives of everyone in society with better results than if people are left to live their own lives as they freely choose.
The Twentieth was the Century of the Welfare State. Governments the world over built and then continuously grew their domestic aid money delivery apparatuses. Tens of trillions of dollars were spent in attempts to raise poor people up and out.
It’s been disastrous.
Budgets/Taxes · Featured · Taxes
There’s an interesting phenomenon playing out in both New Jersey and Ohio: Two of the country’s most prominent conservative Republican governors have proposed new taxes of a sort that haven’t appealed even to traditionally liberal, tax-hungry state legislatures in states like Massachusetts and Washington.
Tomorrow the House Judiciary Committee will hold the hearing “Exploring Alternative Solutions on the Internet Sales Tax Issue.” Taking some time to explore the Constitutional challenges of current proposals which mandate the collection of taxes by businesses across state lines and an examining the potential for the radical expansion of government would be a good place to focus.
Natural selection is the gradual process by which biological traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of the effect of inherited traits on the differential reproductive success of organisms interacting with their environment….
The term “natural selection” was popularized by Charles Darwin who intended it to be compared with artificial selection, which is now called selective breeding.
All of this sounds an awful lot like a free market economy. Species are companies — the market, the environment. Only the capitalism evolution timeline is infinitely compressed. It doesn’t take thousands of years for changes to occur — they happen instantaneously, constantly, incessantly. And the price for natural selection changes for the worse are paid just as fast — a good idea today can kill you tomorrow.
FCC staff just muffed an easy opportunity to advance the IP transition on the FCC’s timetable in the National Broadband Plan. Apparently FCC staff missed the big picture here.
Economics · Featured · Internet/Telecom · Regulation
Since Congress authorized auctions as the preferred mechanism to enable spectrum to find its highest use twenty years ago, U.S. spectrum policy has been market-driven – until now.
Economics · Featured · Internet/Telecom · Regulation
The FCC’s application of its spectrum screen/cap policy is so egregiously arbitrary and capricious it does not pass the laugh test.
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