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The Hidden Cost of Going Green
Here’s a sobering read at SmartMoney on how green products that are supposed to save money can take longer than expected for payback. This holds…
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Video Games are More than Just Good for Kids
They will be a primary way that we learn, teach, produce and advance in the future. Jane McGonigal of Institute for the Future has…
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Should Geoengineering be Banned?
Since one day the sun will expand into a red-giant star, humans in the distant multi-millennial future will either have to leave the Earth, geoengineer…
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The cut-and-paste Splinternet
The way Ben Kunz in a new Business Week artcle puts it, “Each device contains its own widening universe of services and applications, many…
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If we want elephants to die off, we only need to do what we’re doing
They can be saved, however. Dan Hannan in London talks about “privatising” the elephant (and watch the video): To us, elephants are…
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Obama Defends Misguided Spending Stimulus on One-Year Anniversary
Today on the anniversary of Porkulus, President Barack Obama and his staff are defending the massive spending stimulus and sweeping financial, health care, energy…
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Bailout for the First Amendment vs. Preservation of Competing Biases
Clearly many groups contend there’s a “crisis” in journalism, even to the extent of advocating government support of news organizations, despite the dangers inherent…
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Space, the final private frontier
Here’s a case for private space exploration in the Wall Street Journal. Indeed, if we can ever get rid of NASA and the FAA,…
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Preserve Liberty with an Opt-Out Principle
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Act Now! Support a Bold National Elevator Plan
Last week I received Public Knowledge’s press release and letter urging support of a “Bold National Broadband Plan.” I admire PK a great deal on…
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Government should spend nanodollars on nanotechnology.
At least that’s how my former colleague Tom Miller, now at the American Enterprise Institute, used to put it. Still another government/business funded report,…
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Today is “Safer Internet Day”
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“Monopoly” in a media saturated world
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No More Education. Please.
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An alternative to laws against texting while driving?
You can put on makeup while driving, fiddle with your GPS and iPod or reach back to pinch your annoying kid in the back seat,…
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Grab Your #SoTU Pom-Poms
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Bastiat’s Broken Window Fallacy isn’t even an analogy when it comes to Obama
One can only stand back in awe. President Obama said this at Home Depot today: “The simple act of retro-fitting” — installing…
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Cato Institute’s Ed Crane on limited government vs. the parties
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NY Attorney General Files Antitrust Suit Against Intel
Intel does not enjoy government protection of its market share, nor does it operate in a vacuum, immune from discipline if if its rebates are…
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Net Neutrality at 28 kilobits per second.
Why didn’t the Federal Communications Commission impose net neutrality a decade ago? We don’t need all this multimedia and advanced services. They finally caught…
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President Obama’s Back-to-School speech to students
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A Bailout for the First Amendment?
Dan Rather actually made the following two contradictory statements in the same speech: I personally encourage the president to establish a White House…
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Just Another Tuesday in Washington
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Our Colleague Julie Called it “Subprime Healthcare”
I think that about sums it up.
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Aggravated FCC Bureaucrat Knows Better than Us; Calls Petitioners “Sloppy”
Federal Communcations Commission broadband coordinator Blair Levin, charged with coming up with a “U.S. National Broadband Plan,” by February, says the 8,500 pages…
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Doctors On Strike: What if They Just Said “No” to the Healthcare Hairball?
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Water Displacement Forty
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Want Recovery? Remember Antitrust is Anti-Economy
More restraint is in order when it comes to the Obama administrations intent to escalate “antitrust” enforcement against business and enterprise in America.
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Summer 2009 and the Triumph of Unlimited Government
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“Libertarian paternalism”?
In Sunstein's latest book Nudge. . . he makes the case that people often make bad decisions, and a slight "nudge" can set things right…
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Virginia’s shutting down 19 Rest Areas along the interstates
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Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Doctors
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A Handshake, Not a “Contract with America”
Newt Gingrich’s new “Strategy Memo: Time for a Real Stimulus Bill” is helpful on highlighting tax cuts that could stimulate business’ capacity for job…
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Growing Young Statists
Gene Healy’s column in Examiner today chronicles the alarming statism and collectivism of today’s youth and tomorrow’s voters. The generation born from the…
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A funny take on people’s resistance to new technology
"Meet Bronze!" "Bronze is Your Friend!" "Bronze is Brilliant; User-Friendly; and Multi-Purpose!" "Stone is Dead, Prepare for the Age of Bronze!"…
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Obama’s pending cybersecurity overhaul should heed the “Cybersecurity Commandment”…
Not many details have appeared, but the Atlantic reports on a speech given by the administration’s Melissa Hathaway in McLean, VA: In her speech,…
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Well @#$%&, Supreme Court Upholds Ban on “Expleetive Deleetives.”
In FCC v. Fox today, the Supreme Court upheld regulation of “fleeting expletives” on broadcast television. What should be “fleeting” is the nearly century old…
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Well, the Feds at least banned an “amusement tax”
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A National Anthem for April 15
As Tea Parties brew across the land today, I’m reminded of the infamous “Tax Poem” chain email, or, spam, if you like. Set to music…
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“Newspapers are dying; Are universities next?”
Wikinomics warns that non-elite colleges risk the same plight now facing newspapers. Rarely do the dominant industries lead innovation, and in the case of…
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As Washington frets over “behavioral advertising”…
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Imagine There’s No Agency
Washington spends and regulates, and it’s hard to make it stop doing either. Government agencies and programs attract constituencies that want to keep them around,…
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Zero-Based Governing and Improving the State of the Union
Removing burdensome regulations on small business hasn’t figured much into the economic recovery program thus far. Too bad. Alternatives to “spendulus” and the “Bailout to…
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Coming Soon: A Predatory, Anti-Business Federal Trade Commission?
Even an economy in shambles shall not sway the elevation to Federal Trade Commission chairmanship of Jon Leibowitz, an interventionist-minded commissioner who, like all…
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Top Ten Federal Rules to Jettison — According to Small Businesses
The Small Business Administration’s Regulatory Review and Reform initiative (r3) has a new compilation of rules that need reform, according to small businesses across…
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Null Government
Well, the Spendulus/Stimulus will be signed into law within minutes. We’ll soon learn that even this Leviathan-In-A-Box is only the beginning of the Age…
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What would it mean to have no “environmental footprint”?
Maybe to have no life. As this article over at the Ayn Rand Institute points out, the more “eco-friendly” you try to live, the…
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“Spendulus” conference report has passed the House
But thought you might be interested in one congressman’s last-minute appeal to sanity. You, dear reader, are a person things are done to.
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What unlimited government means to you.
Ran across this excerpt from a Wall Street Journal piece that I thought I’d pass along. And this was before the Anti-Stimulus added…
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“Porkulus” has no relation to economic recovery; But other reforms do.
Today CEI and other free-enterprise analysts and advocates are making one last pitch to stop the anti-stimulus package that President Obama is likely to…
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Why “doing nothing” is something really big: Stopping the Anti-Stimulus
Robert Higgs, he of the famous “ratchet effect” theory of government growth (up but never down in answer to a crisis), has…
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Should the Anti-Stimulus Package be tan or beige?
President Obama more than once last week called it “inexcusable” for Congress to get “bogged down in distraction, delay or politics as usual” over the…
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Obama’s defense of weatherizing homes as “stimulus” with Anderson Cooper on CNN is priceless
The President actually said: –it puts people to work –it saves families on their energy bill –it reduces dependence on foreign oil.
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English Arch-Druid wants to limit you to two children
Two children should be limit, says this British green “guru.” What makes him a guru? Saying outrageous things that others should do, but not…
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Ranking geo-engineering strategies, or “climate hacks” to cool Earth down
Numerous approaches have been described to cool what some insist is a warming world (though not over the past few years). In any event, not…
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Birth of the Digital New Deal: An Inventory of High-Tech Pork-Barrel Spending
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TV Transition follies: Plaguing consumers then and now.
Looks like the “digital television transition” to abandon analog and make high-definition broadcasts the standard is not going to happen as planned, but is…
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Avoiding Political Erectile Dysfunction
According to the Congressional Budget Office, “Bailout to Nowhere” money for the proposed new infrastructure stimulus won’t be spent within the next two years–far too…
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How Do Regulations Stack Up as a Small Firm Grows?
Tomorrow, electric utilities and green groups team up at the National Press Club to ask for billions of new spending on what they term energy…
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The Cloverfield Monster of the Internet
Earlier posts today dealt with the hoo-ha over Net Neutrality. By coincidence, an anonymous colleague put the following old 1996 quote by Sen. James Exon…
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“Net Neutrality,” RIP? Well, One Can Hope
Net neutrality has long been a threat to Internet users. Despite the rhetoric and appeals to “openness,” it was always an anti-consumer enterprise, irretrievably and…
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Jay Leno Riffs on the Bailout
A new viral email, claiming to be jokes written by Mr. Leno, adds a bit of humor to the financial crisis. As business and government…
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Abarackadabra! A 21st Century “New Steal”
JOBS, ROADS, BRIDGES, SCHOOLS, BROADBAND, ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORDS, ENERGY…blares the Drudge Report. It’s President-elect Obama’s weekend plan—not to produce, but to transfer yet…
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Wealth-Creating Alternatives to Pelosi’s Destructive Infrastructure “Stimulus”
Well, who can possibly be surprised by the revelation that “The federal government's economic stimulus package will include investment in broadband Internet infrastructure and…
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This week’s Least Objectionable Bureaucrat
My occasional “Least Objectionable Legislator Award” (no prize) takes a detour today and goes to a bureaucrat instead. So the LOL Award (pun intended, I…
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Stimulus as if Capitalism Mattered
Those dispensing the "Bailout to Nowhere" proceeds seemingly answer to no one (here's one article behaving as if this were unexpected and surprising). Today…
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America the Ungovernable
With respect to the ongoing series of bailouts, my colleague Iain Murray pointed out that some sensible British commentators note that one of the ways…
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Hollywood Rep. to Wield Power Over Copyright Law
My colleague Cord asked me about proposing a tech agenda for Congress given the ascendancy today of Henry Waxman to Energy and Commerce Chairmanship;…
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The Least Objectionable Legislator Award
My occasional "Least Objectionable Legislator Award" today goes to Michele Bachmann (R-MN) for a solid statement at today's hearings on the Bailout on Wheels,…
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To Blame Laissez-Faire, Anti-Market Media Must Do Better
Like many of us at CEI, it looks like my former boss Phil Gramm isn't interested in helping anybody pretend that today's financial crisis was…
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To President-Elect Obamaâ€â€Freeze Gov’t Regulations this Winter
Yesterday I called for a major “Deregulatory Stimulus.” Alongside---with financial, health care, energy efficiency, “green job” and other mandates likely in an Obama Administration---the…
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Reject political stimulus, embrace “Deregulatory Stimulus.” And do it FAST.
Facing an economic downturn and an election, politicians of both parties sought to stimulate consumer demand—and some business investment—through political action. They promised that if…
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An Agenda for the Monday a.m. Obama and Bush Meeting
Since the President and President-elect start spending quality Oval Office time together today, and since the incoming admistration's advisors can't settle on either pushing…
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Redistributing Wealth, Simplified
It’s not fully clear what president-elect Obama plans to do on tax policy other than “redistribute” and make those families making over $250,000 pay their…
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Beware of Coercive Utopians and Quack Capitalists
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Civics According to “Mad Men”
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If only you could take it all with you
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No “Technology Czar,” Please
Like everybody else in town, we're pondering the implications of the transition to the Obama Administration for various policy areas here at CEI. On the…
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The Road to Serfdom–Illustrated!
Thanks to CEI colleague Gary Howard for sending along The Road to Serfdom in Cartoons; I’d forgotten all about this capsule version of Hayek’s…
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Let’s hear it for Death, Poverty and Ignorance
Grist seems gleeful that New Scientist thinks “our economy is killing the Earth.” According to New Scientist: Consumption of resources is rising…
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Unstoppable SuperState Stimulus, Part 2
Today’s Wall Street Journal highlighted a new $300 political stimulus campaign. Keynesian demand-management has re-conquered economics as surely as Fall 2008 has cemented…
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Stopping “Badvertising” at Yahoogle.
As an indicator of how perverse wealth-draining antitrust policy has become, have a look at the “concessions” being squeezed out of Google and Yahoo…
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Maybe she could drive the Flintstones’ car.
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From the “So let’s regulate the private sector instead” department.
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The environment as if people mattered (cont.)
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“Every obese adult started eating as a child.”
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Don’t use electricity…or candles
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Milton Friedman on Greed
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A better balance between life and death
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In support of school choice–with guilt
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Wonder if a battery “hack” like this would work on my Honda Hybrid Civic Hybrid?
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When we say “infrastructure socialism,” we mean it.
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To show “how desperately the world needs prime movers and how viciously it treats them”
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Here’s something I’ll keep off the gift list
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Now THIS is global warming!
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Hughie Thomasson of The Outlaws dies
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I still can’t get these “freegans” off my mind.
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Left Brain, Right Brain 2.0
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Who killed TV “family hour”?
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