The Open Market Blog

• By: Doug Bandow
• 11/06/2007

It doesn’t matter how often politicians fail. They keep coming back with grand new schemes for transforming their own, and often other people’s, societies. And…

• By: Hans Bader
• 11/05/2007

The Wall Street Journal had an editorial this weekend describing the ways that the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) would undermine America’s security…

• By: Fran Smith
• 11/05/2007

Terrific front-page article on the influence of the sugar lobby in the Washington Post on Saturday by Dan Morgan recounting how the sugar industry’s…

• By: Hans Bader
• 11/05/2007

CEI rated Rhode Island attorney general Patrick Lynch the fifth-worst attorney general in America in its The Nation’s Top Ten Worst State Attorneys…

• By: Angela Logomasini
• 11/05/2007

Yet another study is out suggesting that air pollution is a considerable risk to our health, as highlighted in today’s Washington Post. This time…

• By: Fran Smith
• 11/05/2007

Eli’s post about historic preservation and his mention of D.C.’s Meridian Hill Park has a lesson for preservationists who promote government as the savior…

• By: Hans Bader
• 11/05/2007

In today’s New York Times, former attorney general John Ashcroft explains why it would be harmful and risky to allow lawsuits to continue against…

• By: William Yeatman
• 11/05/2007

The Draft Gore for ‘08 campaign is picking up steam. According to the Draft Gore Newsletter (sign up here!), signatures are piling up (more…

• By: Eli Lehrer
• 11/05/2007

The D.C. Preservation League recently announced its 2007 list of "most endangered" properties. While there's nothing wrong with historical preservation per se, the recent…

• By: Lene Johansen
• 11/05/2007

Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Florida) has coined this apt term for companies such as Concurrent Technologies during a debate about earmarks for a center Concurrent was…

• By: Ivan Osorio
• 11/02/2007

The new Simpleton’s Guide to the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) is now on our LOST page — and below.

• By: Richard Morrison
• 11/02/2007

In a legislative drama that mixes politics as usual with examples of strange bedfellows and reputational role reversals, it looks like Congress will finally get…

• By: Richard Morrison
• 11/02/2007

Our good friend and adjunct Steve Milloy has a column out today at FoxNews.com, taking apart the latest American Institute for Cancer Research study…

• By: Michelle Minton
• 11/02/2007

Private health care is bad. Public health care will be cheaper and better quality. How do we know this? Proponents of universal care would claim…

• By: Eli Lehrer
• 11/02/2007

Ivan, As I’ve written before, I disagree with your post on the end of D.C.’s zone system. Washington cabdrivers are overwhelmingly independent entrepreneurs…

• By: Hans Bader
• 11/02/2007

In response to complaints by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), the University of Delaware has suspended its coercive indoctrination of…

• By: Richard Morrison
• 11/02/2007

The Senate farm bill is headed to the floor, even as Agriculture Committee chairman Tom Harkin is expressing reservations about some of the…

• By: Richard Morrison
• 11/01/2007

The folks at the National Auto Dealers Association have come up with a neat little web widget for the car curious. You can…

• By: Ivan Osorio
• 11/01/2007

New York has its medallions, and D.C. has its zone system — the bane of each city’s taxi riders. However, unlike the medallion system,…

• By: Ivan Osorio
• 11/01/2007

Legendary music manager Linda Stein, whose pioneering work in the early New York punk scene included, “bringing the Ramones to England for their infamous July…

• By: John Berlau
• 11/01/2007

Talk about the blind leading the blind! Superbank Citigroup Inc. was supposed to be a big player in Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's "superconduit" to provide…

• By: Lene Johansen
• 11/01/2007

Iowa has decided to put a tax on pumpkins that are not consumed. You have to sign a form promising to eat the thing…

• By: Lene Johansen
• 11/01/2007

Just as France has put a temporary freeze on growing corn bred with molecular plant breeding techniques, Austria fails to create a majority within…

• By: Richard Morrison
• 11/01/2007

News from Congress Now on this afternoon’s machinations by members of the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee: Highlighting the difficult straddle facing proponents, a…

• By: Ryan Radia
• 11/01/2007

Today the Senate Commerce Committee passed the Community Broadband Act, ArsTechnica reports. The bill preempts state laws banning publicly funded Internet and allows…

• By: Doug Bandow
• 11/01/2007

The time for wimpy, squishy, liberal environmentalism is past. The crisis is so deep that it’s time to take more, shall we say, “serious” steps.

• By: Fran Smith
• 11/01/2007

The House Ways and Means Committee yesterday cleared the way for a full House vote next week on the U.S.-Peru Free Trade Agreement, H.R. 3688.

• By: Hans Bader
• 11/01/2007

It turns out that the billions of dollars that have been spent on international AIDS programs have largely been wasted. In some places, like…

• By: Michelle Minton
• 11/01/2007

I always worry when a government body starts to sound philosophic. As Ivan noted in his post, the Department of the Interior is struggling…

• By: Marlo Lewis, Jr.
• 10/31/2007

So reports today’s New York Times (Oct 31, 07, p. A10). The Senate voted 70 to 22 to authorize $11.4 billion, or $1.9 billion a…

• By: Ivan Osorio
• 10/31/2007

The bloggers over at DCist are rightly concerned about proposed new rules for photography, filming and sound recording on federal lands that would require…

• By: Hans Bader
• 10/31/2007

Jacob Sullum’s syndicated column describes Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker, in which the Supreme Court will decide whether federal maritime law permits punitive damages…

• By: Michelle Minton
• 10/31/2007

As I wrote about earlier in the week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had been talking about banning exclusivity deals between landlords and cable…

• By: Ivan Osorio
• 10/31/2007

This morning, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 17-4 to send the Law of the Sea Treaty to the Senate floor for ratification. The…

• By: Hans Bader
• 10/31/2007

Congress is set to pass a bloated farm bill that will increase federal sugar subsidies, which have cost taxpayers billions of dollars, and prevent…

• By: Hans Bader
• 10/31/2007

Trial lawyers have brought lawsuits seeking billions of dollars in damages against telephone companies for assisting federal antiterrorism surveillance programs. In today’s Washington Post, Senator…

• By: Fran Smith
• 10/30/2007

On the eve of All Hallow’s Eve, the Boston Globe‘s list of the “Top 50 scariest movies of all time” is worth a…

• By: Ivan Osorio
• 10/30/2007

As the Senate Foreign Relations Committee prepares to take up the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST; also known as UNCLOS, for United Nations…

• By: Angela Logomasini
• 10/30/2007

In Today’s Washington Post, Cindy Skrzycki reports on Devra Davis’s book The Secret History of the War on Cancer. According to Skrzycki, Davis asserts…

• By: Doug Bandow
• 10/30/2007

How you can profit from the coming nuclear holocaust will likely be the next publication by the conservative site Newsmax. After all, it just sent…

• By: Christopher C. Horner
• 10/30/2007

Today one presidential aspirant joined a growing list of senators in opposing U.S. ratification of the Law of the Sea Treaty. Taking as long as…

• By: Hans Bader
• 10/30/2007

The full Federal Circuit Court of Appeals has just rejected a challenge to an earlier ruling that the District of Columbia’s Prescription Drug…

• By: Fran Smith
• 10/30/2007

Eli–Re your post on the Robosaurus, I like these better. The one above weighs about 104,000 lbs. and the one below…

• By: Hans Bader
• 10/30/2007

The moderately conservative Judge Thomas Meskill has died, eliminating one of the few non-liberal judges on the New York-based Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

• By: Lene Johansen
• 10/30/2007

The other side of India’s boom is the corruption and lack of protection of rights for the poor. This story from NPR about a…

• By: Lene Johansen
• 10/30/2007

Nice commentary by Jonathan Chait on Marketplace last week about the problem with farm subsidies.

• By: Hans Bader
• 10/30/2007

Wealthy trial lawyer William Lerach, a big donor to liberal politicians who specialized in bringing class action lawsuits, has pled guilty to giving kickbacks.

• By: Lene Johansen
• 10/30/2007

As EU allows four more GMO crops (crops created with molecular plant breeding techniques), the new president of France puts a temporary “freeze”…

• By: Doug Bandow
• 10/30/2007

It appears that the Communist Party of China occasionally makes a mistake. Too bad millions of people already have paid a price and millions more…

• By: Doug Bandow
• 10/30/2007

The health care mess is complicated. It's a strange mix of government and private, with perverse tax incentives skewing the entire system. Handing the whole…