Ex-Officials Dispute Iraq/al-Qaida Links (Washington Post): “As President Bush works to quiet a controversy over his discredited claim of Iraqi uranium shopping in Africa, another of his prewar assertions is coming under fire: the alleged link between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al-Qaida.”
Going for the Look, but Risking Discrimination (NYT): “Hiring for looks is old news in some industries, as cocktail waitresses, strippers and previous generations of flight attendants know all too well. But many companies have taken that approach to sophisticated new heights in recent years, hiring workers to project an image. In doing so, some of those companies have been skirting the edges of antidiscrimination laws and provoking a wave of private and government lawsuits.
Over two centuries, “periodic catastrophic declines that destroy years of accumulated profits are the norm, not the exception,” says David Schwartz in The Observer.
I guess we always knew it: speed has never been the strong suite of government, unless it’s something like enacting a Freon ban on the basis of junk science. The announcement of the permanent withdrawal of the British-French supersonic airliner from service joins a long list of similar, failed public enterprises, although at 34 years, this particular boondoggle has lasted longer than most of its predecessors.
I noted with displeasure a bit of statism in AutoWeek for July 14 of a type I normally associate with the larger media that are more tightly bound to the political class. Rich Ceppos, the publisher, reverses his course of the past 30 years or so (if he’s that old) and thanks Ralph Nader for causing cars to be more the way he (Ceppos) wants them to be than they would have been otherwise. Those of
Nader started out his career trashing small cars lke the Corvair as “unsafe at any speed,” but now he thinks they’re peachy and that the state should force us all into mini-Yugos. He’s now part of the anti-SUV crowd — you know, the Mercedes 500- and Porsche-driving, gas guzzling Hollywood/D.C. environmentalists.
Unusual to see this level of understanding in the mainstream business press: Money, It’s a Gas (CNN.com): “The wall of money bearing down on the economy has begun to hit. We’ve known it was coming for a while. The shift in Fed policy from promoting disinflation to fanning the flames of inflation, the outsized tax cut by Washington, the easing tensions in the financial markets were clear enough signals.
Lew Rockwell on Bush’s proposed Head Start reform: “There is no worse way to begin life in this world than with a dependency relationship to the state as versus parents. Parents are led to believe that there are no costs or responsibilities associated with raising kids, and kids are led to think of the government as their benefactor. This impression forms their political inclinations for the rest of their lives.
This transcript from a May IMF forum on deflation makes for interesting reading, if only to highlight the extent to which the mythology of the inflation fix is so seriously entrenched among IMF economists: “In sum, while risks of generalized global deflation appear small, there is an increased vulnerability to deflation in several countries. The main policy message is that a more symmetric attention to risks of falling, as well as rising, prices is warranted.
