The ADA Racket

The current issue of City Journal features an article The ADA Shakedown Racket.

This article describes a trend of entrepreneurial lawyers filing multiple lawsuits against business for violionts of ADA regulations. The lawsuits are filed on behalf of disabled people who are recruited for this purpose, because such a lawsuit requires a plaintoff, but often one who would never use the facility in question.

Spendathon

Writes Bill Bonner: Here are the average annual real increases in domestic discretionary spending: LBJ: 4.3% Nixon: 6.8% Ford: 8.0% Carter: 2.0% Reagan: -1.3% Bush I: 4.0% Clinton: 2.5% Bush II: 8.2%

(Source: Club for Growth, based on U.S. Budget, Historical Tables, 2004)

Where Food Comes from

The New York Times has editorialized in favor of mandatory country-of-origin labeling for “our food supply” on the grounds that consumers allegedly a) want to know where their food comes from and b) would prefer to “buy American” if they knew it were an option. There is certainly nothing wrong with wanting to buy American, and you can bet your bottom dollar that profit-seeking entrepreneurs would love to identify a group of consumers who are willing to pay a premium for food produced in the USA.

Who Benefits from Free Trade, and How

If the benefiting consumers from an innovation are largely outside of a given country, writes Robert Murhpy, then it is indeed true that the people in that country might actually be poorer as a result of the innovation. But in that case, no trade policy can change things. On the other hand, if enough of the benefiting consumers are inside a particular country, then the people in that country are helped (on net) by the innovation.

The Military and Bureaucracy

From Gary North

Read this article by W. Lind with Mises’s distinction between profit management and bureaucratic management in mind. An army, unlike most other bureaucracies, faces a kind of market: a war. There are success indicators imposed by outside forces independent of the army. Thus, entrepreneurship must function in an army in order for it to survive. This is not true of other bureaucracies.

Currency Wars

Though politics may yet trump sound economics on this issue, writes Sean Corrigan, the Europeans know they are being blackmailed by the US into pursuing dangerously loose monetary policy (to add to the loose fiscal policies already being practiced by some of their governments). The biggest global spendthrift—usually the US—always expects his creditors to cut their own pockets so he can settle his bills with the coins falling out of them.
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