property

John Nothdurft and Donny Kendal present episode #111 of the In The Tank Podcast. Today’s podcast features work from the Tax Foundation, the Illinois Policy Institute, The Property and Environment Research Center, and the Fraser Institute.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Illinois averaged more than 40,000 permits for new single-family houses per year prior to the so-called Great Recession.

The Constitution is an extraordinary document. Life for most humans for most of human history has been poor, nasty, brutish and short. The Constitution acknowledged this past (and present) – and transformed our future.

April 26 is World Intellectual Property (IP) Day: “We celebrate World Intellectual Property Day to learn about the role that intellectual property rights (patents, trademarks, industrial designs, copyright) play in encouraging innovation and creativity.”

Does fracking cause housing prices to fall? The answer to that question is more difficult that it might seem. Many anti-fracking activists have claimed oil and natural gas development has led to substantial decreases in property values in areas where drilling occurs, but other places, such as North Dakota, saw property values skyrocket during the boom in oil production.

There was on Monday a quintessential example of the horrendously bad thinking of those opposed to all things intellectual property. An op-ed totally disconnected from Reality – and chock full of thought-free, pathetic anti-property platitudes.

Last Monday was Presidents Day. But that holiday is relatively new – an amalgamation of the birthdays of George Washington (President #1, February 22) and Abraham Lincoln (President #16, February 12). It is now a day set aside to celebrate all American Commanders-in-Chief.

In today’s edition of the Heartland Daily Podcast, Isaac Orr, Heartland Research Fellow for energy policy, joins H. Sterling Burnett to talk about his newly released study on the impact of frac sand mining – Social Impacts of Industrial Silica Sand (Frac Sand) Mining: Land Use and Value.

Back when I was a musician – writing songs rather than things like this – I was just about the only one I knew who wasn’t stealing music via the heist website Napster. And I lived in Austin, Texas – the “Live Music Capital of the World.” I knew a LOT of musicians.

For the second consecutive Congress, expanding protections for trade secrets of U.S. businesses has emerged as an important issue in both chambers. Identical bills were offered in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate titled the Defend Trade Secrets Act of 2015 (DTSA). The bills were referred to the Committee on the Judiciary in both chambers.

In what has been a rough couple of months for the Obama administration on the regulatory front, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has issued a temporary nationwide injunction halting the controversial new Waters of the United States rule (WOTUS) of the Clean Water Act. The U.S. District Court in North Dakota had already issued a preliminary injunction against the rule in late August, but the Obama administration claimed the injunction applied only to the 13 states bringing suit. The nationwide injunction is a significant setback for Obama and his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

In rural North Carolina, Lyndon McLellan runs the L&M Convenience Mart, a small gas station and restaurant, half a mile outside the limits of Fairmont. In the summer of 2014, every last penny of McLellan’s business bank account was drained by Internal Revenue Service (IRS) agents, on the pretext McLellan was attempting to conceal evidence of money laundering.

A recent study of eminent domain takings and their associated state and local government tax revenues suggests buying grandma’s farmhouse to make room for a strip mall isn’t the automatic economic boon it’s claimed to be, leaving some wondering if the use of eminent domain as an economic booster is ethical.