Tag: Regulation

  • Articles of Interest

    Kansas budget, wind power, alternative fuels gone wild, newspaper bailouts, journalism entrepreneurship.

  • The ABC’s of Virginia Alcohol Law

    At the recent Sammies awards presented by the Sam Adams Alliance, a video titled The ABC’s of Virginia Alcohol Law received an award. It’s a funny video. It’s not the most important issue in the world, but it shows us another example of the ways that government get so twisted up in a knot (of…

  • How does Kansas fare in freedom, compared to other states?

    The Mercatus Center at George Mason University has just published a fascinating paper that ranks the states in several areas regarding freedom. According to the authors, “This paper presents the first-ever comprehensive ranking of the American states on their public policies affecting individual freedoms in the economic, social, and personal spheres.”

  • Another inept Kansas smoking analogy

    In today’s Wichita Eagle, Wichita busybody Charlie Claycomb makes another inept analogy in an attempt to press his anti-smoking agenda statewide. A while back he tried to compare a smoking section in a restaurant with a urinating section in a swimming pool. This is ridiculous to the extreme, as I show in the post It’s…

  • The “Watchful Eye” Fallacy

    “In his inaugural address on January 20, 2009, Barack Obama said: ‘Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control.’…

  • Kansas exempts itself from onerous regulation

    Yesterday the Kansas Senate passed a sweeping state-wide smoking bill that prohibits smoking in nearly all indoor places in Kansas. Except for casino gaming floors.

  • Markets are the best regulators

    Since the start of the current financial crises, we’re told that markets are at fault. The most common diagnosis is that there’s not enough regulation in place, and only a move away from reliance on markets and toward more laws and regulations will save the economy.

  • Do We Have Too Little Regulation?

    One of the things we’re being told by the mainstream media is that deregulation is the cause of our current economic crisis. If only Bush hadn’t torn up so many regulations, we wouldn’t be in this trouble. Only adding more regulation will save the economy. Free markets — as if our economy is based on…

  • Pragmatism must recognize reality

    Any editorial that starts with “Karl Marx was right about at least one thing …” deserves close examination, especially when it appears in Kansas’ largest newspaper and is written by that newspaper’s former editor. The thrust of Davis Merritt’s article is that the theory of free markets hasn’t worked: “We’re painfully experiencing right now the…