The Republican Party is holding their national meeting this winter. This is standard fare for both parties, and these meetings are generally taken up by electing and appointing various people, tweaking the platform in small ways, and generally being an excuse for party leaders to get together and schmooze each other once in awhile.
A [...]

Imagine that you own a watchdog. You’ve tasked this watchdog to watch your house and to prevent theft. You paid a lot of money for the dog and for the expert who trained the dog. And over the years, the dog has managed to chase away a couple of would-be thieves. [...]

There is a really good article in the New York Times today on the problem of paid sick leave, specifically the fact that it often doesn’t exist. It reminds me of an episode of the TV show House in once saw. House is talking to a buddy about diseases spreading around the hospital. [...]

Free market capitalism is premised on the idea that open competition between competitors leads to better products and lower prices. Why? Because customers will flock to the cheaper and/or better products at the expense of the more expensive and/or worse products. That leaves the economic loser with two options: improve or go [...]

I haven’t traveled extensively internationally, so I’m not sure if this problem goes beyond the borders of the United States. But within the United States I can unequivocally state a key fact that makes the lives of millions of Americans needlessly more complicated than it otherwise should be: it is a heck of a [...]

I remember watching the news, it must have been around the year 2000, and seeing several economist-pundits discussing the “new economy”. The general agreement on the round-table that day, with only one dissenter, was that the United States had entered into a post-cycle economy due to the technological boom of the 1990s and that [...]

Rest easy, America. We know that the auto industry is in turmoil, the economy is leaking both jobs and money, the health care system is broken, our educational system is in need of overhaul, and our fiscal future is in doubt. But at least Congress is acting in a bipartisan way to fix [...]

I’ve said before that for-profit insurance is an awful idea. Companies that run insurance pools have incentives to keep as much money in the pool as possible at all times, because it is off of that money that they make their profits. In practice, that can mean delaying or denying legitimate claims, forbidding [...]

The EPA has just proposed a rule that would require medium and large companies in a variety of industries to report their emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants. This would allow the EPA to better track who is polluting and where. It’s a fabulous idea. It’s such a wonderful, not to [...]

The auto industry is back in the news again, as they go back to Washington to ask for more money. I’ve been thinking about the auto industry, and realized that GM is only partly to blame for their problems. A lot of the fault just as to do with a fundamental flaw in [...]