political

All the opinion polls suggested that the VP debate did little or nothing to change voter decisions

John Nothdurft and Donny Kendal present episode #113 of the In The Tank Podcast. Today’s podcast features work from the Cato Institute, the Illinois Policy Institute, the Washington Policy Center and the Reason Foundation.

The political and financial establishments of Europe and the United States were taken by almost total surprise and sent into apparent shock when 52 percent of the voters in the United Kingdom chose for their country to leave the European Union (EU). But it is not the end of the world as we know it, and can be a positive sign and example of opposition to unrepresentative and centralized bureaucratic control over people’s lives.

Separating reality from ideology and political agendas is difficult, but essential, if we are to revitalize our economy and help the world’s poorest families take their rightful places among Earth’s prosperous people. Energy reality is certainly in our favor. But ideological forces are powerful and persistent.

The news is filled with the everyday zigzags of those competing against each other for the Democrat and Republican Party nominations to run for the presidency of the United States. But one of the most important issues receiving little or no attention in this circus of political power lusting is the long-term danger from the huge and rising Federal government debt.

Independent Communications Consultant Jessica Sena and research fellow Isaac Orr give the The Heartland Daily Podcast listeners the information they need to debunk advocates of this policy, which is impossible to accomplish from a practical standpoint, and incredibly expensive. “Keeping it in the Ground” will lead to higher prices for low income families in the developed world, and premature death in developing nations.

Because Arne Duncan, the former secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, often engages his mouth before his brain, the case for abolishing the department may have just become stronger than ever.

In today’s edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, managing editor Jesse Hathaway talks with Berin Szoka, president of TechFreedom, a non-profit organization devoted to promoting the progress of technology that improves the human condition, about how regulators both at home and abroad are using the power of the state to combat zero-rating, a kind of sponsored-data plan where access to popular web applications like Facebook or streaming video services is made available to consumer at no cost.

If advocates of freedom were to make up a list of New Year’s resolutions for 2016, one of the most important items should be ending government’s monopoly control over money. In a free society, people in the marketplace should decide what they wish to use as money, not the government.

President Barack Obama put the final nail in the Keystone XL Pipeline’s coffin by formally rejecting the permit for the transnational pipeline that would have carried crude oil produced in Canada south to refineries on the Gulf Coast. The president’s decision was not based on science but on politics, predicated specifically on political posturing for the COP-21 climate conference in Paris, France.

No surprise that political activist Larry Lessig, the intellectual leader of the net neutrality and anti-copyright movements, ran one of the most cynical, undemocratic, and stunt-driven Presidential candidacies ever, because that’s exactly the kind of cynical, undemocratic, stunt-driven campaigns his political followers have run to un-democratically dictate net neutrality and to undermine copyright protection online.

A recently released study claiming to have found a statistical association between hydraulic fracturing and hospitalization rates in Pennsylvania has been popular in the news. However, just about every aspect of this study is problematic, rendering it to the realm of speculation, not science.

A new report by the National Association of Scholars shows how popular the sustainability movement has become college and university campuses in the United States and around the world, since the movement was formally organized on college campuses in 2006. The NAS’s study argues, the movement poses a serious threat to liberal education and to political and economic liberty.