Some worthwhile posts on policy issues/from policy blogs today:
Third Decade isn’t buying the justification for local utilities’ rate hikes. I’m not either.
Sterling Newbury rails against wind farm NIMBYism.
Eduwonk advises liberals against pressing the academic freedom too far in public lower ed: "While it might sound like a great idea to let people like […]
Politically, the fate of car insurance in the Commonwealth is building up as a political battle between forces for deregulation and forces to preserve regulation. Within the given market realities, that battle is important. However, Steve Bailey pens the piece that needed to be written on the subject. Accident rates, not regulatory schemes, are the […]
It’s not often that I lean libertarian, but on the Food Police I think they’re right: this group is frightening! If they ever had full power and decided to follow their logic of government-as-actuarial-enforcemer I’d seriously consider life in exile. Under the guise of "public health", actuarial mentality and panic over children, we’re seeing the […]
Fresh off the resolution of a boycott crisis, Bay Windows has another great editorial: Our Problems Are Bigger than Microsoft. The lede says it all: “The thing that makes the Microsoft story so maddening is that despite the fact that Microsoft is an evil company, it’s our evil company.” Susan Ryan-Vollmar goes on to analyze […]
Chris Mooney reads a Washington Post editorial against anti-tobacco litigation and takes objection, arguing that the prime benefit of such lawsuit is its deterrence effect for corporate misdeeds.
[I]t wouldn’t just be “satisfying” to see the tobacco companies held accountable. They, and other companies, need to get the message that you simply can’t get away with […]
Go read Benjamin Wallace-Wells’ Washington Monthly article on the current housing bubble. Even more than the Economist’s survey on the topic, the piece explains the bubble, the likely economic fallout and the political dimensions in clear, readable terms.
As one of the overheated housing markets, Boston should pay special attention - currently the average home […]
In my post yesterday on the difference between pro-business and pro-market impulses of conservative policy, I neglected an obvious point: that Democrats - or more precisely, the swath of the political spectrum that the Democrats represent - vary in the strength of their support for the market. What’s surprising about this presidential primary race so […]
The business press loves to fulminate against Attorney General crusaderism and in particular the spotlight-seeking (or so the critics charge) antics of New York AG Eliot Spitzer in playing securities regulator. It’s true that solving the problem state-by-state rather than federally is a recipe for increased legal and regulatory burden on business for no good […]
For those still following the Enron scandal (there don’t seem to be many these days), David Warsh has a good overview of the coverage of Enron by the business press. It’s clear that he doesn’t like the New York Times (I think he’s being unfair - I thought their post-9/11 coverage was excellent), but he […]
I agree with Dan Kennedy that the amount of live coverage devoted to last night’s blackout was absurd. But I, for one, am glad the media is talking about something other than the California recall. Plus, the story IS interesting - perhaps more so, as we visit it the next day and figure out what […]
This weekend’s Times article on spam is worth a look, if only to discover that the Federal Trade Commission’s point person on the matter is named Orson Swindle. One of their conversations includes a decidely libertarian take on the matter from Release 1.0 editor Esther Dyson:
Spam is not just one thing. And I don’t want […]
The New York Times has an interesting article on South Korea’s broadband success story. As much as the high rate of broadband household connections attests to the success of their semi-interventionist government policy, it’s also an indictment of the semi-non-interventionism of American de-regulation, in particular the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which offered competition in spots, […]
From today’s AP wire: “President Bush told Congress on Friday that America’s vibrant free-market system was the key factor in allowing the country to deal with the shocks of a recession, terrorist attacks and corporate scandals.” Bad timing: it turns out that one of the things this vibrant free-market system excelled at was dodgy tax […]