Interventionism, though written nearly sixty years ago and published now for the first time, expertly dispatches a scheme popular with a few contemporary conservatives.Interventionism, though written nearly sixty years ago and published now for the first time, expertly dispatches a scheme popular with a few contemporary conservatives.
Around the country, sports entrepreneurs have been responding to a perceived social problem by doing what they do best: efficiently serving customers. The advent of the work-out craze led to the blossoming of a prospering health-club industry. Along with growth, however, came certain problems, some of which are the result of men and women using the same fitness facilities.
Labor Day, 1998. Time for picnics and taking it easy. Time too for thousands of blue-collar faithful to gather in Detroit not far from the United Automobile Workers Solidarity House to hail pet politicos and union chiefs and speechify, talk up income redistribution, snitch credit for America's high living standards, and gratuitously attack Wall Street, the rich, and corporate greed.
Over the past ten years, the budget of the National Institutes of Health has doubled, and the government medical research outfit is demanding even more dramatic increases in the future. Scientists on the government dole gush about the possibilities for new discoveries—and last year's budget of $13.6 billion wasn't enough to bring them about.
The Clinton administration, applying its theory that all good things should be subsidized with tax dollars, proposes new spending to upgrade the Internet. But it's not the government that has turned this medium into the most promising venue for free-market exchange in our time. It's the astounding power of market commerce itself.
Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert, emerged a few years back as one of the cleverest cartoonists in the long history of that art. His eponymous protagonist, by now familiar to everyone, is a software engineer with vaguely defined duties at a large technology firm. Dilbert's closest companion is Dogbert, a philosophical pooch with the self-professed aim of world conquest.
After hundreds of years of attacks on Christmas, economists have finally gotten into the act. Yale University's Joel Waldfogel, writing in the American Economic Review, condemns what he calls "The Deadweight Loss of Christmas." Once you cut through the calculus and graphs, his conclusion is clear: though Christmas generates a $50 billion gift-giving industry, a tenth to a third of that is sheer loss. Why? Because the recipient doesn't always get what he wants. Given the chance, the recipient would have purchased something else.
Employees at the Environmental Protection Agency presume to protect us from all sorts of supposed evils. But in doing so, no bureaucrats, save the tax collectors, are more vicious in their trampling of property rights. For example, they have made life miserable for people who own auto salvage and parts companies, and the drivers who depend on them.
