If I have made any valuable discoveries,
it has been owing more to
patient attention
than to any other talent.
Sir Isaac Newton
My Favorite Economics Historian Explains the State's Growth Spurts
Our National Balance Sheet Is About to Go (Baby) BOOM!
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(Illinois Policy Institute). In 1969, when Bo Schembechler took over the head coaching job at the University of Michigan, he hung up a sign in the locker room to inspire his team through grueling summer workouts. It read: “Those who stay will be champions.”
With the United Steelworkers expected to win a ruling from the Chicago office of the National Labor Relations Board, or NLRB, that will allow them to unionize football players at Northwestern, that sign might need to be amended to read “Those who stay will get seniority.”
We libertarians are for free association; what we disdain are corrupt labor monopoly unionists exploiting their connections with the lawless Obama Administration. What a steelworkers' union has in common with universities, God knows. Quite frankly, the NCAA should have long ago addressed some of these concerns, like concussions, student transfers and out-of-pocket expenses (at the same time football coaches are sometimes the most highly compensated university employees). We can all think of ways collective bargaining would be absurd in the world of amateur athletics--e.g., a team refusing to play if the coach benches a starter for an infraction or decides to replace the incumbent quarterback with a hotshot freshman prospect under seniority rules. But, most importantly, the last thing we need is incompetent-as-usual federal intervention; it will ruin college sports as we know them. The students should rely on moral persuasion.
Enough money to the large corporate intetests. Let the players get some of the hundreds of millions they earn the corporations. If we believe in the free market, this is what we support
Do you know what story you're commenting on? We are talking about football programs and universities (including state-operated) where "profits" are used to subsidize other sports programs, and by one USA Today story, only about 7 public universities broke even on sports over a multi-year period.
(Cato Institute). "It will be ironic indeed if the only aspect of Obamacare to ultimately survive is a bigger, unreformed version of a failed entitlement program. It will be even more ironic if it was Republican governors and legislators who brought it about."
Not so ironic. Recall Romney's motivation for installing the public policy atrocity of RomneyCare was the threat the Bush Administration threatened to turn off the Medicaid spigot and blow the Massachusetts state budget wide open. These governors will likely no longer be in office when the Fed's teaser rate Medicaid expansion expires...
I don't see the irony. Republicans had their turn making historic increases in Medicare and Medicaid under the last president. It seems like consistent policy in favor of more government intrusion into medical markets. And it is a policy that is very much bipartisan.
This is "progressive" troll garbage as usual. As bad as Bush was in expanding Medicare with an unpaid drug benefit (opposed by nearly all conservatives), 3 of Bush's 12 vetoes were against expansions of SHIP and Medicare. The Dems generally wanted to expand federal health programs into the middle class and argued Bush's Medicare drug benefit was too stingy; the GOP, while realizing it was politically impossible to repeal federal healthcare programs, fairly consistently wanted the programs to run more efficiently and not engage in morally hazardous policy by loosening program eligibility.
(Cato Institute). If Pope Francis and President Obama want to help the world’s poorest people, here's what they should advocate for....
Free trade? Pff. Don't mistake this as some benevolent suggestion to help those poor Africans and Asians. No, free trade makes it EASIER to outsource production to countries with a lower standard of living which means the workers are paid pennies compared to American workers. These goods are then imported back to the US, without tariffs, to be sold at an even higher profit margin. Make no mistake, free trade is not in the best interest of the American worker. Yes, their wages increase, but those other, richer nations will see decreases in wages. A global economy will seek equilibrium amongst the wages of the global labor market. Also, free trade will lead to LESS US-produced goods. As they will be imported cheaply from other countries.
It's a waste of time arguing with economics-illiterate protectionist trolls whom have never heard of the law of comparative advantage. The US, which has nearly a quarter of global GDP with about 5% of the population, is at its best not competing in low-margin, commodity-labor markets but more value-added, typically capital-intensive enterprises. Everyone gains from trade and competition making products more varied and inexpensive. If the US dollar wasn't backed by our robust, diversified private economy, nobody else in the world would take the green paper printed by the Federal Reserve. For example, Italy has very limited natural resources but a highly educated workforce and effective producers of factory-produced goods like shoes. Our resource developers gain customers to drive relative production costs lower, and Italy is really good at producing quality shoes. (There's a good 2008 Gray Lady article of how Italy's footwear producers responded to the challenge of inexpensive Asian-produced footwear.) Our real issue is NOT with razor-thin margins of foreign producers but with misguided government regulation and inertia, deferring the introduction of market-dominating goods and services.
Political Cartoons
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| Courtesy of Henry Payne and Townhall |
Suzanne Vega, "Luka"
