The Open Market Blog

• 06/10/2008

Thanks to the Greens, the US Congress and the administration to continue locking up the American land. Yesterday, the House easily approved three more wilderness…

• By: Ryan Young
• 06/10/2008

There were more street protests in Seoul on Sunday over U.S. beef. The public is scared out of their minds that they’ll get mad…

• By: Alex Harris
• 06/10/2008

I’ve spent the past couple of days at the ACLU’s membership conference. The conference provides ACLU members, such as myself, a chance to get…

• By: John Berlau
• 06/09/2008

The business media is abuzz about a speech and Financial Times op-ed today by Federal Reserve Bank of New York President Tim Geithner calling…

• By: William Yeatman
• 06/09/2008

Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) looked ridiculous last week when she insisted the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act would cause…

• By: Eli Lehrer
• 06/09/2008

My former employer, the United States Senate, will–at long last–turn over its dinning facilities to a private contractor. Anyone who has ever had to…

• By: Ryan Radia
• 06/09/2008

Are you a mobile phone user, FiOS TV subscriber, or DirecTV customer who's happy with your service and bound by a long-term contract? If so,…

• By: Ivan Osorio
• 06/06/2008

Today’s Los Angeles Times profiles Guatemala’s Universidad Francisco Marroquin, which I’ve had the pleasure to visit on a few occasions, and its founder,…

• By: Ivan Osorio
• 06/06/2008

Tim Carney continues to expose the rent-seeking motives behind a lot of environmental regulation, in this case cap and trade legislation. As he notes,…

• By: Ivan Osorio
• 06/05/2008

Roky Erickson, the 1960s Texas psychedelic rock pioneer, sang of seeing demons and space aliens, which visions were often the result of his taking…

• By: Ivan Osorio
• 06/05/2008

Want to promote organic farming? Then take over a country, destroy its economy, and starve its people — and then make them grateful for allowing…

• By: Hans Bader
• 06/05/2008

In a blistering attack, the Wall Street Journal today criticized the Federal Reserve’s inflationary easy-money policy, which aims to bail out mortgage borrowers through low interest rates, but…

• By: Hans Bader
• 06/05/2008

“U.S. and British diplomats were attacked Thursday as they tried to investigate political violence in Zimbabwe and a U.S. Embassy staffer was beaten,” reports…

• By: Hans Bader
• 06/05/2008

The California State Teachers’ Retirement System suffered “more than one billion in lost investment returns” after it divested from tobacco company stocks in 2001, reports…

• By: Doug Bandow
• 06/05/2008

I missed this when it was first published, but it turns out that fat people cause global warming!  Reports Reuters: Obesity contributes to global…

• By: Ryan Radia
• 06/04/2008

Yesterday’s New York Times featured a refreshingly optimistic article discussing Raymond Kurzweil’s revolutionary vision of the future. A brilliant futurist and visionary, Dr. Kurzweil has…

• By: William Yeatman
• 06/04/2008

General Motors announced yesterday that it is closing 4 pickup truck…

• By: Eli Lehrer
• 06/04/2008

Via our friends at The Heartland Institute we find a selection of letters that a sixth grade class sent to Heartland decrying its…

• By: Iain Murray
• 06/04/2008

A gang of the usual enviro suspects (NRDC, Blue Green Alliance, Sierra Club and Green For All) together with the United Steel Workers and the…

• By: Hans Bader
• 06/04/2008

The ACLU claims to exist to protect the civil liberties and constitutional rights of all Americans, but it’s really just an unprincipled left-wing lobbying group.  Recently,…

• By: Ivan Osorio
• 06/03/2008

Fittingly only a few days after CEI’s dinner celebrated the Great Revolutionary Ideas, it’s time to pay tribute to a music revolutionary, Bo Diddley,…

• By: Ivan Osorio
• 06/02/2008

Ever since Fidel Castro handed over the official reins of power to his (not that much) younger brother Raul, pundits and editorial writers have taken…

• By: Ivan Osorio
• 06/02/2008

Whenever I see farmers protesting, I usually expect them to be crying out for government favors in the form of higher subsidies and trade barriers…

• By: Ryan Young
• 06/02/2008

It looks like the impasse on the U.S.-South Korea trade agreement will get worse before it gets better. A mad cow disease scare…

• By: Eli Lehrer
• 06/01/2008

Via fark.com, there’s a Daily Mail story about how more than 100 homeless people live permanently in London’s Heathrow airport. There’s no clear source…

• By: Hans Bader
• 06/01/2008

War-torn Afghanistan, a critical front in the war on terrorism, is being impoverished by rising food prices aggravated by ethanol subsidies and mandates, reports the June…

• By: Hans Bader
• 05/30/2008

Texas’s Child Protective Services (CPS), which the state supreme court ruled acted illegally in seizing more than 400 children, repeatedly abused children, according to…

• By: John Berlau
• 05/30/2008

Last week, I discovered a bizarre requirement for a fingerprint registrty in housing legislation that had just passed the Senate Banking Committee. In an OpenMarket…

• By: Ryan Young
• 05/30/2008

Contrary to popular belief, regulators tend to be very clever people. They know the rules of the game, and they know to how to use…

• By: Hans Bader
• 05/30/2008

The Greenlining Institute, which is funded by money diverted from class-action lawsuits brought in the name of consumers, is now lobbying the California legislature…

• By: Hans Bader
• 05/29/2008

The Texas Supreme Court has just affirmed an appeals court ruling that Texas’s Child Protective Services (CPS) illegally seized more than 400 children whose…

• By: Hans Bader
• 05/29/2008

Ethanol subsidies are contributing to worldwide hunger.  Islamic extremist groups are exploiting that hunger by tying food aid to anti-Western political indoctrination.  (Ethanol…

• By: Hans Bader
• 05/29/2008

The Supreme Court made up some new laws on Tuesday because it thought they were a good idea, as the Washington Post’s editorial today notes.

• By: Hans Bader
• 05/29/2008

State Child Protective Services (CPS) are increasingly seizing children from their parents for trivial reasons or over baseless, anonymous allegations, as the Washington Examiner describes…

• By: Hans Bader
• 05/28/2008

Texas Child Protective Services (CPS) illegally seized 465 children from parents in a religious sect based on an anonymous, fabricated allegation by a woman outside the sect…

• By: Ivan Osorio
• 05/28/2008

I wonder what Matt Welch means when he accuses Czech President Vaclav Klaus of “resisting most efforts to come to public (let alone legal)…

• By: Ryan Young
• 05/28/2008

Barack Obama says he would keep in place the 47-year old Cuban trade embargo if elected President. CNN says Obama views the trade restrictions…

• By: Doug Bandow
• 05/28/2008

What can you say about a health care system that treats animals more quickly than humans?  Reports Macleans: Dr. Danny Joffe is only half…

• By: Angela Logomasini
• 05/27/2008

The Washington Examiner has an editorial today titled “Environmentalism is not about the Environment.”  Indeed. …

• By: Hans Bader
• 05/27/2008

The Washington Examiner has an interesting editorial today called “Environmentalism Isn’t About the Environment.”  It describes how environmental measures expand and metastasize government power in ways…

• By: Hans Bader
• 05/26/2008

In the Washington Examiner, Daniel Ballon and Lawrence McQuillan criticize a bill pending in Congress that would lead to credit card companies reducing their rebates to…

• By: Hans Bader
• 05/25/2008

The federal government massively subsidizes corn-based ethanol production, even though it consumes as much energy as it generates, thus doing nothing to cut greenhouse gas emissions.  Yet the federal government…

• By: Fran Smith
• 05/23/2008

In a strong defense of international trade  and the pending U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement, President George W. Bush in a Fox interview today also worried…

• By: John Berlau
• 05/23/2008

Author’s note: See follow-up post “Are Borrowers Next?” Fingerprints are considered to be among the most personal of information, and fingerprint databases created and…

• By: Fran Smith
• 05/22/2008

On Reason‘s blog today, Michael C. Moynihan asks the question, “Does Yusuf al-Qaradawi Qualify as an Intellectual?” Moynihan was referring to al…

• By: Ryan Young
• 05/22/2008

Right now South Korea is working toward a free trade agreement with the U.S. It could increase trade between the two nations by…