How to Fix the U.S. Economy? Stop Tinkering With It!

Richard W. Rahm's column in the Washington Times nails it. From creating too much easy credit to creating artificial scarcities of important commodities to over-regulation, government meddling gets it wrong all too often. It's a credit to American ingenuity and entrepreneurship that this country creates so many small businesses each year despite all of the obstacles that continue to be placed in the way.

Are there any candidates running from either major party who understand this? Doesn't seem that way, although McCain promised that he would work to make the Bush tax cuts permanent.

Canada doesn't follow the script

"Sun Stays Sluggish as Weathermen Fight for Anti-Ice Age Funding," declares the headline in Popular Mechanics. What? Anti-Ice Age funding? I thought the global warming scam that is enriching ADM, GE and Al Gore, among many others, was enough. Now they want funding in order to study a possible Ice Age?

I think the Canadians are on to something. We've seen that a scientific examination of some of the underlying assumptions and methods used to establish a case for the so-called "Hockey Stick" reveals significant problems in the data, methods and assumptions. More honest, open, scientific study; less uniformed action, please. Certainly we can agree that the solutions we choose should contain as little corporate welfare as possible in order to be economically viable.

The earth may be warming, the adverse consequences of warming may be harmful to life, and there may be actions that man can take to address those actions. However, forcing developing nations into adoption of no-growth policies that essentially keep those countries depressed and under the thumbs of despots is no solution. Man has adapted to his environment for thousands and thousands of years. There is no question that we can do so again, and I bet that we can do so without causing poorer nations to suffer the consequences of tree-hugger angst and liberal guilt.

H/T: Instapundit.

Game On!

Super Bowl? Super Tuesday? No, in my opinion, the biggest clash that is well and truly engaged today is Google vs. a team of Microsofties and Yahoos.

Microsoft's press release contains a copy of the letter from Steve Ballmer to Yahoo's board. The letter contains this very interesting bit of news:

In February 2007, I received a letter from your Chairman indicating the view of the Yahoo! Board that “now is not the right time from the perspective of our shareholders to enter into discussions regarding an acquisition transaction.” According to that letter, the principal reason for this view was the Yahoo! Board’s confidence in the “potential upside” if management successfully executed on a reformulated strategy based on certain operational initiatives, such as Project Panama, and a significant organizational realignment. A year has gone by, and the competitive situation has not improved.

We are in for a very interesting year as this proposed merger moves ahead, and a very interesting battle of the titans if the Microsofties and Yahoos are allowed to combine forces.

It's about time

As reported in The New York Times, the F.T.C. Asks if Carbon-Offset Money Is Well Spent

Jason Miks is lucky enough to have had A Conversation with Bjorn Lomborg. He's still correct; I hope he's right that more climate scientists are becoming global warming catastrophe skeptics, at least for the next half century. I also applaud his efforts to attempt to get mankind focused on real problems like indoor air pollution caused by burning the wrong fuels to heat homes, lack of drinking water and encouraging responsible use of pesticides in developing countries to control disease.

With the sadness that comes with the passing of Milton Friedman comes pleasure at reading tributes to him from those who knew him and from reading articles written by the great man himself.

It's unfair to excerpt from the second article since it is already an abridgment of longer works by Friedman. Still, this excerpt is among my favorites:

"The company town has been revived in one major area: medical care. It is taken for granted that workers should receive their pay partly in kind, in the form of medical care provided by the employer. How come? Why single out medical care? Surely food is no less essential to life than medical care. Why is it not at least as logical for workers to be required to buy their food at the company store as to be required to buy their medical care at the company store?"

--from "Pricing Health Care: The Folly of Buying Health Care at the Company Store," Feb. 13, 1993

Wow! The Israelis may have a process to convert oil shale into refinable oil at the equivalent of $17 per barrel.

The reaction of the environmentalists:

Amid various presentations on the nature of the fuel resource, problems unique to processing this fuel, emerging technologies, economic issues, etc. was a presentation by an attorney representing the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance that could be summed up in one sentence: "It is really bad - don't do it."

And of the wildlife advocates:

the observation of a Mexican Spotted Owl in a canyon nearby one of the reserves, which therefore qualified the area as a habitat for an endangered species.

The Israelis appear to be a couple of years ahead of the US in this field. Hopefully we will learn enough from their experience to alleviate these concerns by those who want alternatives to foreign oil as long as they're alternatives that are ineffective and don't address the actual need.

Tim O'Reilly considers the hardware costs of the PS3 and the subsidization of hardware by long term commitment to software and services:

I forget who I heard ask me a year or two ago, "how long will it be before we can give away cars for a multi-year commitment to the information services embedded in them?" That question is increasingly on the horizon.

The National Center for Public Policy Research documents the distribution of "Kyoto Protocol Survival Kits" at a United Nations Global Warming Conference.

One of the giants of this or any other age, Milton Friedman, has died.

Godspeed, Milton.

Update: Instapundit posts a link to more praise here.

Euro-Humanity on the Wane is a scathing indictment of what has happened to public education in the UK, and how it has underperformed private and "black market" private schools in India.

Quoting from Christopher Chantrill's excellent article: "Contrary to the received notion, it appears that the urban poor are not too poor, or too ignorant, or too feckless to send their children to school—or to pay for it.

And we are idly tossing into the air another very small idea, as inadvertently suggested by the documentary Up Series. What if children suckled at the teat of government schools generally grow up to be adult adolescents, don’t bother to marry, and don’t bother to have children?

They would be well on the way to the status of H.G. Wells’ Eloi in The Time Machine, 'humanity upon the wane,' shortly to fall into the clutches of the Muslim Morlocks. For when society sets itself 'steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword,' it has no need to develop 'intellectual versatility… the compensation for change, danger, and trouble,' until it is too late."

Read the whole thing.

"Bad climate science yields worse economics"

An excellent example of truth, succinctly expressed, by Steven Milloy, FoxNews.com's Junk Science columnist.

I enjoyed reading Cato-at-Liberty on "The Kyoto Charade."

Quote: "One of the things I keep trying to hammer home to the media is the extent to which legislative promises to meet environmental goal X sometime in the future have almost always been, and likely always will be, meaningless blather.

The reason is simple. Voters love promises to accomplish wonderful things, but they don’t love burdensome policies to secure those wonderful things. Because the public’s attention span is quite limited to say the least, loud and vigorous promises to slay environmental dragons will harvest political capital while subsequent failure to actually slay those dragons will go relatively unnoticed and cost politicians little."

That sums up the entire environmental/global warming movement: make promises impossible to keep, but let everyone feel good about having made them, regardless of the consequences.

Hurrah! A victory for common sense, commerce and the Panamanian people (not necessarily in that order)! Publius Pundit: World Watches Panama Amid Big Victory for Trade

H/T: Instapundit.

Tom Evslin can make even a discussion of how to choose replacement windows sound interesting.