From the Agitator:

George Will urges the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down an Illinois law that may be the next step in post-bailout, post-Kelo America: direct transfer of the profits of successful industries to the accounts of those that are failing. The Illinois law attempts to prop up the state’s sagging horse racing industry by requiring the state’s four most profitable casinos to simply hand over 3 percent of gross receipts to Illinois’ horse racing tracks. The bill was recently upheld by the state’s supreme court.

More here.

And the slide towards a new socialism continues.

From the Western Standard:

One of the biggest confusions in the current mess is the claim that it is the result of greed. The problem with that explanation is that greed is always a feature of human interaction. It always has been. Why, all of a sudden, has greed produced so much harm? And why only in one sector of the economy? After all, isn't there plenty of greed elsewhere? Firms are indeed profit seekers. And they will seek after profit where the institutional incentives are such that profit is available. In a free market, firms profit by providing the goods that consumers want at prices they are willing to pay. (My friends, don't stop reading there even if you disagree - now you know how I feel when you claim this mess is a failure of free markets - at least finish this paragraph.) However, regulations and policies and even the rhetoric of powerful political actors can change the incentives to profit. Regulations can make it harder for firms to minimize their risk by requiring that they make loans to marginal borrowers. Government institutions can encourage banks to take on extra risk by offering an implicit government guarantee if those risks fail. Policies can direct self-interest into activities that only serve corporate profits, not the public.

Many of you have rightly criticized the ethanol mandate, which made it profitable for corn growers to switch from growing corn for food to corn for fuel, leading to higher food prices worldwide. What's interesting is that you rightly blamed the policy and did not blame greed and the profit motive! The current financial mess is precisely analogous.

More here.
(via the fine folks at The Line is Here)

From Cato@Liberty:

In a study released today by the Cato Institute, economist and Cato adjunct scholar Shirley Svorny says no:

In the United States, the authority to regulate medical professionals lies with the states. To practice within a state, clinicians must obtain a license from that state’s government. State statutes dictate standards for licensing and disciplining medical professionals. They also list tasks clinicians are allowed to perform. One view is that state licensing of medical professionals assures quality.

In contrast, I argue here that licensure not only fails to protect consumers from incompetent physicians, but, by raising barriers to entry, makes health care more expensive and less accessible. Institutional oversight and a sophisticated network of private accrediting and certification organizations, all motivated by the need to protect reputations and avoid legal liability, offer whatever consumer protections exist today.

Consumers would benefit were states to eliminate professional licensing in medicine and leave education, credentialing, and scope-of-practice decisions entirely to the private sector and the courts.

If eliminating licensing is politically infeasible, some preliminary steps might be generally acceptable. States could increase workforce mobility by recognizing licenses issued by other states. For mid-level clinicians, eliminating education requirements beyond an initial degree would allow employers and consumers to select the appropriate level of expertise. At the very least, state legislators should be alert to the self-interest of medical professional organizations that may lie behind the licensing proposals brought to the legislature for approval.

Svorny’s study is here.

Angry Renter is a grass roots campaign created by Freedom Works to oppose the corporate welfare that's being handed out to bail out mortgage companies that made bad or stupid decisions.


From the Angry Renter website:

You know a web site is making a difference when the Wall Street Journal publishes a hit piece on the front page!

We don't find it particularly shocking that a grassroots group working for limited government would launch a grassroots petition opposing a government housing bailout...but hey, we're not in the newspaper business.

We're not sure how a reporter can call this effort "fake" or "astro-turf" when we've put our name on every page and when over 48,000 real people have voluntarily visited and signed the petition.

FreedomWorks was founded back in 1984 and we're headquartered in Washington, D.C. We're based in D.C. because we fight for taxpayers and Washington, D.C. is where they pass the laws and spend trillions of your tax dollars every year. We are a non-profit organization chaired by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey with over 20 staffers across the country. Like every non-profit organization, from Sierra Club to the AARP, we respect the privacy of our donors and do not disclose them.

More here.

And From the Wall Street Journal:

AngryRenter.com looks a bit like a digital ransom note, with irregular fonts, exclamation points and big red arrows -- all emphasizing prudent renters' outrage over a proposed government bailout for irresponsible homeowners.

"It seems like America's renters may NEVER be able to afford a home," AngryRenter.com laments. The Web site urges like-minded tenants to let Congress feel their fury by signing an online petition. "We are millions of renters standing up for our rights!"

Angry they may be, but the people behind AngryRenter.com are certainly not renters. Though it purports to be a spontaneous uprising, AngryRenter.com is actually a product of an inside-the-Beltway conservative advocacy organization led by Dick Armey, the former House majority leader, and publishing magnate Steve Forbes, a fellow Republican. It's a fake grass-roots effort -- what politicos call an AstroTurf campaign -- that provides a window into the sleight-of-hand ways of Washington.

More here.

New York is trying to collect taxes from online merchants, even if they have no physical presence in the state and Amazon is suing, claiming the law is unconstitutional.

From the New York Times:

Amazon filed a complaint in State Supreme Court in Manhattan objecting to the law, which was approved as part of the $122 billion state budget that Gov. David A. Paterson signed last week. The law is expected to raise about $50 million.

The issue is not whether people should pay tax when they buy goods from out-of-state sellers like Amazon. For decades, the state has required them to pay sales or use tax.

The question is whether the vendors must collect that tax on behalf of the state. Generally, only those companies that have a physical presence — like an office or store — in the state where the purchase is made are required to collect the tax.

The new law is based on a novel definition of what constitutes a presence in the state: It includes any Web site based in the state that earns a referral fee for sending customers to an online retailer. Amazon has hundreds of thousands of affiliates — from big publishers to tiny blogs — that feature links to its products. The state law says that thousands of those have given an address in New York State, although the addresses have not been verified.

Shouldn't the state where the business was located have the most legitimate claim on sales taxes from transactions that took place with that business. I'm just sayin'.

More here and here.

Is it really all that bad to allow the free market to work it's "magic" when it comes to organ donation?

I guess to most people it is, but, I'm not the only person who thinks it could be a good idea. Stephen J. Dubner thinks it may be a good idea, too.

From the Freakonomics blog @ NYTimes.com:

Here is an oversimplification of a complex problem:

1. Thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, a sick or dying human being can receive a transplanted organ from another human being.

2. Some of those organs must inevitably come from cadavers: i.e., you can’t give your heart to someone else and still live. But some transplanted organs can come from living people. Chief among them is the kidney: we are born with two but can live with one.

3. As the science has improved, there has been a huge increase in demand for transplantable organs. But the supply has not kept up with demand. The kidney waiting list gets longer every year, and every year more people die while still on the waiting list. The supply of kidneys from both cadavers and living donors is insufficient.

More here.

From D. T. Armentano @ the Future of Freedom Foundation:

I have been teaching economics at the university level for twenty-five years. Easily the most often-asked questions relate to monopolies. The questions are often put in the following form: "In an economy free of governmental regulation, wouldn't a firm or group of firms obtain a monopoly over some vital resource or product? And won't the monopoly then exercise its power by raising prices?"

The issues most often revolve around the oil industry and the famous Standard Oil Company antitrust case. The history of Standard Oil, students frequently tell me, proves that monopolies exist in free markets — and that they do raise prices arbitrarily — and that this is precisely why we need antitrust laws.

Are monopolies truly an inherent problem in a free market? And do we need antitrust laws to combat them?

The clearest definition of monopoly is one seller, with the law prohibiting competitors from entering the market. Local telephone and cable-television companies are examples — they are usually provided a monopoly by their local governmental officials — that is, they are made the only provider of the service in a certain locale — and competition is prohibited by the local governing body. Obviously, this is not a monopoly arising in a free market since it is the government not the market that is dictating the number of suppliers. The best way to get competition in these types of activities is to remove the legal restrictions on market entry — which, by the way, is happening in some cable-television markets, which has resulted in a decrease in prices.

More here.

From CNBC:

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke should resign and the Fed should be abolished as a way to boost the falling dollar and speed up the recovery of the U.S. economy, investor Jim Rogers, CEO of Rogers Holdings, told CNBC Europe Wednesday.

Asked what he would do if he were in Bernanke's shoes, Rogers, who slammed the Fed for pouring liquidity in the system and accepting mortgage-backed securities as guarantees, said: "I would abolish the Federal Reserve and I would resign."

More here.

Ahhh.....Free trade.

From US News:

As Barack Obama would happily concede, words are powerful. Words matter. So let's briefly look at the words of Obama on trade. Here is Obama from his book The Audacity of Hope, sounding all Tom Friedman:

We can try to slow globalization, but we can't stop it. The U.S. economy is now so integrated with the rest of the world, and digital commerce so widespread, that it's hard to imagine, much less enforce, an effective regime of protectionism. A tariff on imported steel may give temporary relief to U.S. steel producers, but it will make every U.S. manufacturer who uses steel in its products less competitive on the world market.... U.S. Border Patrol agents can't interdict the services of a call center in India, or stop an electrical engineer in Prague from sending his work via email to a company in Dubuque. When it comes to trade, there are few borders left.

More here.

On a side note I happen to be a free-market capitalist (oink oink bitches).