My friend David Kirby passed along an interesting article from the Harvard Business School Web site proposing a novel method of executive compensation. A perennial problem for shareholders is that you want to give your CEO a personal incentive to improve performance by making her compensation dependent upon it in some way. The trick is […]

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It’s a couple years now since former Reagan administration econowonk Paul Craig Roberts astonished his free-trading erstwhile allies by collaborating with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on an anti-outsourcing New York Times op-ed that was rapidly and roundly condemned as an embarassing farrago. I checked in with PCR’s latest jeremiad on the topic mostly out of […]

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My old friend Tim Lee acts as a kind of hyper-wonky Crypt Keeper for two harrowing short tales of private interests capturing state power. At his home base of the Show-Me Institute, he reports on a paradigm case of eminent domain abuse: A Saint Louis lessee who decided he’d rather be an owner has sicced […]

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If a libertarian had written this New York Times op-ed as a piece of Swiftian satire, I can only assume it would have been regarded as ham-handed and over-the-top. But barring some recent and little-publicized reversal of ideological polarity, I’ve got to suppose quondam presidential aspirant Mike Dukakis and UCLA prof Daniel Mitchell are in […]

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Republicans probably could’ve picked a more propitious time to propose a $100 million federal voucher program for low-income kids in failing schools. After all, it’s coming on the heels of a much-discussed Education Department report that, as The New York Times summarized it, “debunked the widely held belief that public schools were inferior to their […]

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A front-page article in yesterday’s Washington Post provides a fascinating short history of mission creep in federal agricultural disaster relief programs, which should be required reading in courses on public choice. While the whole thing’s worth reading, you really get the essence of what you need to know in the headline: “No Drought Required For […]

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So, I’m reading an interesting book due out in the fall from Princeton called The Altruism Equation, about the search for the evolutionary origins of altruistic behavior, and a section dealing with the influence of Thomas Malthus got me thinking about fertility trends and inequality. It’s a pretty well established fact that both within and […]

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James Markels has a piece up at the America’s Future Foundation’s Brainwash webzine puzzling over why Apple insists on charging the same price, 99 cents, for every song on iTunes, whether it’s the top single on the Billboard charts or one of Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch’s lesser known tunes. (I just had a […]

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I just spotted the following meme making its way around MySpace—I’m leaving the whole thing as-written, so I don’t have to litter the text with “sic” for each of the myriad little errors: On May 15th all myspace members are to not go to the gas station in protest high gas prices. Gas is now […]

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Matt Welch makes a super-important point about the Kelo decision in this L.A. Times column: In California, private-property eminent domain transfers must be conducted under the legal cover of “blight,” which has come to mean “prime real estate in a rapidly gentrifying area.” Recall that New London’s argument in Kelo hinged in part on the […]

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