Commentary

"There is a common argument that goes like this: Many immigrants are poor, and some poor people abuse welfare. Therefore, we should not let in more legal immigrants, some of whom may abuse and eventually bankrupt the welfare system. Count on that to continue to be the core argument of immigration skeptics as the debate on that critical issue continues. But a large and growing body of data refutes that notion and in fact suggests that the opposite is true: Without immigration, America’s welfare state would go bankrupt sooner." (06/14/13)

"If you were a real estate agent with nearly 8,000 properties for sale, what would you do? You might be thinking, 'Well, duh. I would sell them. Cha-ching!' Seems really simple, but the St. Louis Land Reutilization Authority (LRA) does not appear to have that same mindset." (06/16/13)

"Enough is enough, John Hickenlooper. For more than sixty years, wherever my life has taken me, I was always proud of having been born in Colorado, and always happy to return after traveling to and living in far places. Colorado was my home. It was never perfect. Freedom didn't pulse through the veins of the state the way it seems to in Montana or Wyoming. But the potential was always there, and if one turned a blind eye to that suppurating ulcer on its face known as Denver, Colorado was a wonderful place to live. But you have fixed that, haven't you, Hick?" (06/16/13)

"Suppose you give your 30-year-old daughter a list of groceries to buy for you and $25 to pay for them. Does your daughter have to report the $25 to the IRS as income? Of course not." (06/15/13)

"Is your lack of concern with government snooping a result of your confidence that (a) you, your loved ones, and your friends consistently act in ways that do not violate (what you believe to be) today’s government policy; (b) government will seldom-enough err in interpreting the contents and motives of your, your loved ones’ and your friends’ activities; and (c) that today’s government policy targets and penalizes only those private activities that 'ought' to be targeted and penalized by government? If so, are you also confident that government policy will never change to render those same activities of you, your loved ones, and your friends unacceptable to government tomorrow?" (06/15/13)

"The reaction of official Washington to disclosures of its malfeasance has been to use positions of power to lie about the nature of the threat - improbable 'terrorism’' versus the corporate-state fascism that keeps it in office and earning profits; to lie about the nature of the malfeasance -- trashing the Constitution to claim rights and privileges for itself the Constitution specifically prohibits; and to charge the actions of Edward Snowden in disclosing the information he did to be an enemy of the people rather than one of the few citizens in recent history who has acted in the name of community and justice rather than against it." (06/14/13)

"Whether you are new to Congress or have weathered many a political campaign welcome (back) to Washington. I too have recently taken on a new role as the president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. I trust we are wise to remember, however, that our respective new (or renewed) roles are nothing more than a transfer of a precious intellectual inheritance. We all should be focused on implementing the legacy of centuries of ideas about how individual and economic liberty combined with limited public institutions improve human dignity, from Adam Smith to the U.S. Founders to Lord Acton to F. A. Hayek and many others." (06/12/13)

"In response to my Wall Street Journal piece yesterday, some folks have asked if I was ever in AmeriCorps. No, but I did have a cameo in one of their Mississippi programs." (06/14/13)

"Robert Fogel died a few days ago. He was a prominent figure in the academic economic history profession for five decades, virtually from the time he burst onto the scene with the publication of a polished-up version of his Johns Hopkins Ph.D. dissertation, Railroads and American Economic Growth, in 1964. This book was the most impressive accomplishment to date of the type of research espoused by those who participated in a research program known as the new economic history, econometric history, or cliometrics, which had begun to take shape in the late 1950s. The hallmark of this program was the systematic application of neoclassical economic theory and the methods of statistical inference in the study of economic history." (06/15/13)

"Maybe because when political communities adopt libertarian institutions, principles, and policies such as property rights, freedom of speech and association, freedom of contract, free trade, and legislative checks and balances, the results are generally good, and when communities adopt antithetical institutions and policies the results are generally bad." (06/13/13)

"The same force which has turned entities like Blockbuster and MySpace into commercial has-beens is the same force which will turn the State into an anachronism. The individualism that provokes and motivates billions of people around the world to remove felt uneasiness and improve their standards of living, whether those billions would describe their actions in such terms or not, is also the same force which drove Edward Snowden to leak the details of NSA corruption." (06/14/13)

"I recently stumbled upon a gem of an article presenting the kind of teachable  moment that usually passes unnoticed. Yahoo! Games reports on a glitch  in the popular computer action/role-playing game 'Diablo III,' developed and  published by Blizzard Entertainment. Being a gamer myself, I took a look and  discovered a probably unintentional lesson in inflation." (06/14/13)

"The recent news about so-called NSA surveillance programs brought back a familiar argument. Liberty and security, we are told, need to be balanced or traded off against each other. People on different sides of this debate help themselves to this image. Some (well really, more and more people) use it to claim that some of our liberty should be sacrificed at the alter of security. Others, often invoking Benjamin Franklin’s famous line, use the same argument to resist these programs. Whether you endorse or fear the NSA’s activities, this talk of trading off freedom for security or a need to 'balance' the two is really not helpful. Here are two reasons." (06/15/13)

"In his treatment of public goods in Principles of Economics, 5th edition, Greg Mankiw gives the standard two characteristics of a public good: (1) the good is non-excludable, that is, a person can not be prevented from using it, and (2) the good is non-rival in consumption, that is, one person's use of the good does not reduce another person's ability to use it. So far, so good. This is what, I suspect, almost all economists teach. But then, to drive the point home, he shows these two dimensions in a matrix, with whether it's rivalrous in consumption on the horizontal and whether it's excludable on the vertical."

"'Governments, like married couples, are entitled to their secrets' has written Richard Cohen a few years back. Which secrets? Lines have to be drawn. A government shouldn't cover up crimes under the mantle of secrecy. It shouldn't conceal wrongful seizures and exercises of power. This government and the preceding one under Bush have concealed the fact that they were collecting information wrongfully, namely, information on private communications. The term 'national security' cannot reasonably be invoked as an excuse for doing this because it's too vague, and almost anything can be construed as affecting 'national security.'" (06/17/13)

"When you cut through the fog, the NSA controversy is about whether we should trust people with institutional power. Edward Snowden’s courageous exposure of massive secret surveillance separates those who say yes from those who say, 'Hell no!'" (06/14/13)

"The thing that interests me most about the intelligence scandals is the revelation of how amateurish the people who run our Great National Institutions seem to be. I had assumed that the government was doing exactly what it has been revealed to be doing -- getting everyone’s telephone records. I had assumed that any serious terrorist would assume the same. But if Edward Snowden was able to 'reveal' the taking of this super-secret information, how many other people could reveal the same, or more?" (06/13/13)

"Located in rural Petersburg, Michigan -- about 70 miles southwest of Detroit -- the Duval farm has been in the family for generations. The property is being seized by the federal government through civil forfeiture proceedings because of the state-registered medical marijuana greenhouses that were kept on the land. Jeremy and Jerry Duval were convicted at trial and sentenced to five and ten years in prison, respectively. Apparently unsatisfied with robbing a father and son of their freedom, the government has decided to go after the family farm." (06/14/13)

"Blount was an American statesman and land speculator, and a signer of the United States Constitution. He was a member of the North Carolina delegation at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and led efforts in North Carolina to ratify the Constitution in 1789. He subsequently served as the only governor of the Southwest Territory, and played a leading role in helping the territory gain admission to the Union as the State of Tennessee. He was selected as one of Tennessee’s initial U.S. senators in 1796." (06/16/13)