BrianGarst.com

Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem.

Tuesday

30

October 2012

The 3 Myths of Disaster Shysters

Written by , Posted in Economics & the Economy, Energy and the Environment, Liberty & Limited Government

It’s that time of year again – when a major natural disaster is dominating the news cycle, and every economic, scientific and political snake oil salesman or huckster comes out of the woodwork to peddle their magical wares. Here are three myths with which the disaster opportunists are trying to swindle you:

1) There’s an economic silver lining to all this destruction because it will spur economic activity. This one isn’t so much trying to sell you anything as it is cheer you up, but its widespread acceptance nevertheless can have devastating policy consequences – like passage of foolish economic “stimulus” bills. This myth is basically just Bastiat’s broken window fallacy:

Paul Krugman is rather infamous for his love of destruction as economic catalyst, crediting as he does the destruction of WWII for ending the Great Depression and having noted the economic good that could come from the 9/11 attacks. And then there’s his belief that what the economy really needs to get turned around is an alien invasion. Krugman is utterly fixated on what is seen – such as the making of bombs or the rebuilding of homes – while he ignores what is unseen – like everything not built so that resources can be used instead to fight little green men.

Krugman is not the only one to fall for this myth. Commentators are quick to highlight the expected economic gains from Hurricane Sandy, with some only concerned that Sandy won’t cause enough destruction, and that hurricanes like it don’t happen regularly enough, to really get the economy rolling.

For a more in depth critique at the flawed logic behind this persistent myth, check out this excellent column by Tim Worstall.

2) Hurricane Sandy (or whatever the disaster de jour may be) proves that Global Warming is real! In the minds of some, anything that happens today must be more severe than anything that came before, if for no other reason than that it affects them. That sort of narcissism is almost certainly behind the blathering of Meghan McCain, who thinks the wandering of a mere Category 1 hurricane into her northern enclave is proof positive that Republicans are Neanderthal deniers.

This interpretation was also given the official blessing of Al Gore, the high priest of Global Warming hysterics:

The images of Sandy’s flooding brought back memories of a similar–albeit smaller scale– event in Nashville just two years ago. There, unprecedented rainfall caused widespread flooding, wreaking havoc and submerging sections of my hometown. For me, the Nashville flood was a milestone. For many, Hurricane Sandy may prove to be a similar event: a time when the climate crisis—which is often sequestered to the far reaches of our everyday awareness became a reality.

While the storm that drenched Nashville was not a tropical cyclone like Hurricane Sandy, both storms were strengthened by the climate crisis.

…Hurricane Sandy is a disturbing sign of things to come. We must heed this warning and act quickly to solve the climate crisis.

Every major weather event these days is proffered as anecdotal proof of global warming (or “climate change”). But anecdotes are not evidence, and major storms are nothing new. In fact, global hurricane frequency is trending down, and as Patrick Michaels points out, we’re setting records for the longest drought of Cat 3+ hurricanes hitting shore:

It’s been 2,535 days since the last Category 3 storm, Wilma in 2005, hit the beach. That’s the longest period—by far—in the record that goes back to 1900.

But don’t expect any of these facts to stop the reflexive blaming of global warming for all natural disasters.

3) Only Big Government can save us from chaos and natural destruction. Any time destruction lurks, statists can be counted on to furiously construct strawmen for public whipping to placate the frightened masses. The most ridiculous example comes, naturally, from the ever dependable shills of big government at the New York Times, which editorializes that “A Big Storm Requires Big Government,” before going on to outline a list of government functions that comprise probably less than a percent of the federal budget. Good job, New York Times, I’m now convinced that we need a massive welfare state, pointless “green energy” loans, wasteful stimulus bills and a cumbersome and counter productive regulatory structure, all because of a Category 1 hurricane. Well done.

Reason appropriately takes them to task, noting that not only has big government failed, and miserably so, at disaster response in the past, but it actually stood in the way of private action. That’s right, big government – being the angry and jealous God that it is – actively prevented help from other sources during Katrina:

Even as they fumbled their own responses to the disaster, government officials found time to block private relief efforts. The Salvation Army was initially forbidden to send boats to rescue refugees sheltered in one of its facilities, one of the group’s officials told the press. It seems the private relief organization’s efforts didn’t fit the government’s schedule. Likewise, the American Red Cross said. Days after the storm hit, “The state Homeland Security Department had requested — and continues to request — that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane.”

Aaron Broussard, Jefferson Parish president, put it best when he told interviewers, “Bureaucracy has murdered people in the greater New Orleans area and bureaucracy needs to stand trial before Congress today.”

But in the eyes of some, any failure of government is just proof that it needs more money (success, meanwhile, is proof that it needs more money), and so we get hand wringing over potential, hypothetical or imagined FEMA cuts from the same people who blamed FEMA for everything wrong that happened during Katrina.

The Reason post also notes, as I have here in the past, that there are in fact alternative and better sources of disaster response. This is not to say that government has no role or purpose, as the statist strawman would imply, but that it might be better to only leave government in charge of monitoring, analyzing and disseminating information, while bringing in those who know what they are doing and have actual experience to handle the logistics of rapidly moving goods and services into devastated communities.

Whatever their miracle cure of choice, consumers should cast a wary eye on those who see disaster coming and can only think to lick their chops at the opportunity to advance their agenda.

Sunday

21

October 2012

George McGovern: From Liberal Reformer to Reformed Liberal

Written by , Posted in Big Government, Culture & Society, Liberty & Limited Government, The Nanny State & A Regulated Society

George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic Presidential nominee who lost handily to Richard Nixon, passed away this morning at the age of 90. The media is celebrating him as a universally respected and genuinely nice politician, as well as a liberal icon. These things are true, but tell only part of the story. McGovern was also the rare politician capable of rethinking his positions as he acquired new information and experiences (not to be confused with the many more politicians who change positions out of convenience).

Was he a liberal? Undoubtedly. But he also came, once out of office, to respect the importance of economic freedom and the practical costs and burdens placed on business by the same liberal policies he supported while in office.

McGovern is well known for his opposition to Vietnam and idealist push for a vast collection of liberal policies. With his passing today, the media is quick to celebrate his devotion to liberalism, and he should be celebrated in so far as he fought vigorously for what he truly believed, but less likely to be mentioned in the media coverage is the degree to which he came to challenge liberal orthodoxy, specifically its brand of economic paternalism.

He was particularly influenced by the difficulty he encountered after leaving office in attempting to run an inn, which he outlined in 1992 in the Wall Street Journal:

In 1988, I invested most of the earnings from this lecture circuit acquiring the leasehold on Connecticut’s Stratford Inn. Hotels, inns and restaurants have always held a special fascination for me. The Stratford Inn promised the realization of a longtime dream to own a combination hotel, restaurant and public conference facility–complete with an experienced manager and staff.

In retrospect, I wish I had known more about the hazards and difficulties of such a business, especially during a recession of the kind that hit New England just as I was acquiring the inn’s 43-year leasehold. I also wish that during the years I was in public office, I had had this firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day. That knowledge would have made me a better U.S. senator and a more understanding presidential contender.

…My own business perspective has been limited to that small hotel and restaurant in Stratford, Conn., with an especially difficult lease and a severe recession. But my business associates and I also lived with federal, state and local rules that were all passed with the objective of helping employees, protecting the environment, raising tax dollars for schools, protecting our customers from fire hazards, etc. While I never doubted the worthiness of any of these goals, the concept that most often eludes legislators is: `Can we make consumers pay the higher prices for the increased operating costs that accompany public regulation and government reporting requirements with reams of red tape.’ It is a simple concern that is nonetheless often ignored by legislators.

For example, the papers today are filled with stories about businesses dropping health coverage for employees. We provided a substantial package for our staff at the Stratford Inn. However, were we operating today, those costs would exceed $150,000 a year for health care on top of salaries and other benefits. There would have been no reasonably way for us to absorb or pass on these costs.

Some of the escalation in the cost of health care is attributed to patients suing doctors. While one cannot assess the merit of all these claims, I’ve also witnessed firsthand the explosion in blame-shifting and scapegoating for every negative experience in life.

Today, despite bankruptcy, we are still dealing with litigation from individuals who fell in or near our restaurant. Despite these injuries, not every misstep is the fault of someone else. Not every such incident should be viewed as a lawsuit instead of an unfortunate accident. And while the business owner may prevail in the end, the endless exposure to frivolous claims and high legal fees is frightening.

…In short, `one-size-fits-all’ rules for business ignore the reality of the market place. And setting thresholds for regulatory guidelines at artificial levels–e.g., 50 employees or more, $500,000 in sales–takes no account of other realities, such as profit margins, labor intensive vs. capital intensive businesses, and local market economics.

The problem we face as legislators is: Where do we set the bar so that it is not too high to clear? I don’t have the answer. I do know that we need to start raising these questions more often.

His policy advice is important, and I would urge liberals to take it to heart. But I found particularly interesting the hints at a greater need for personal responsibility – a realization that sometimes bad things happen and that there are not always other people to blame or who need to be made to pay for your misfortune or poor choices.

He expanded on this theme in a 1997 New York Times op-ed defending freedom of choice, and again in 2008, where he wrote in the Wall Street Journal to warn against economic paternalism and to defend a number of practices – such as payday lending – that are frequently targeted by today’s liberals:

Under the guise of protecting us from ourselves, the right and the left are becoming ever more aggressive in regulating behavior. Much paternalist scrutiny has recently centered on personal economics…

Since leaving office I’ve written about public policy from a new perspective: outside looking in. I’ve come to realize that protecting freedom of choice in our everyday lives is essential to maintaining a healthy civil society.

Why do we think we are helping adult consumers by taking away their options? We don’t take away cars because we don’t like some people speeding. We allow state lotteries despite knowing some people are betting their grocery money. Everyone is exposed to economic risks of some kind. But we don’t operate mindlessly in trying to smooth out every theoretical wrinkle in life.

The nature of freedom of choice is that some people will misuse their responsibility and hurt themselves in the process. We should do our best to educate them, but without diminishing choice for everyone else.

A conservative or Republican making this exact statement today would be condemned by modern liberals as a heartless extremist and free market zealot, but McGovern was none of those things. He was simply willing to observe how liberal policies worked in practice, and in some cases this caused him to rethink his policies. He didn’t stop being a liberal or abandon his principles, he just continued to learn throughout his life. His is an example that the rest of us could learn from.

Friday

19

October 2012

Overgovernment: No Free Learnin’ Edition

Written by , Posted in Education

Technology has made information more accessible than ever. It is also providing potential answers to the problem of exploding tuition costs and student loan debt. Which is to say, alternative education models are in the nascent stages. An example is Coursera, which offers free online courses from top universities. Who could object to that? Government, of course (Hat-tip: Reason):

Coursera offers free, online courses to people around the world, but if you live in Minnesota, company officials are urging you to log off or head for the border.

The state’s Office of Higher Education has informed the popular provider of massive open online courses, or MOOC’s, that Coursera is unwelcome in the state because it never got permission to operate there.

The Minnesota Office of Higher Education offered this clarification/explanation:

George Roedler, manager of institutional registration and licensing at the Minnesota Office of Higher education, clarifies that his office’s issue isn’t with Coursera per se, but with the universities that offer classes through its website. State law prohibits degree-granting institutions from offering instruction in Minnesota without obtaining permission from the office and paying a registration fee. (The fee can range from a few hundred dollars to several thousand, plus a $1,200 annual renewal.) That means that it’s Stanford, Columbia, Michigan, the University of Melbourne, et al. that are violating Minnesota law by partnering with Coursera to offer courses that Minnesota residents can take for free.

“It’s not like we’re sending the police out if somebody signs up online,” Roedler adds. “It’s just that the school is operating contrary to state law.”

The law’s intent is to protect Minnesota students from wasting their money on degrees from substandard institutions, Roedler says. As such, he suspects that Coursera’s partner institutions would have little trouble obtaining the registration. He says he had hoped to work with Coursera to achieve that, and was surprised when they responded with the terms-of-service change notifying Minnesota residents of the law.

Setting aside that free courses still don’t fall within the scope of this argument, Minnesota apparently regards its citizens as morons. The plebes are simply too stupid to evaluate the quality of institutions without guidance from their government betters.

But what makes anyone think government knows how to evaluate institutions for quality better than potential customers? As is so often the case with licensing and registration schemes, the government is serving the role of protector of  established business interests at the expense of industry newcomers. The side effect of this approach is the suppression of innovation.

Thursday

18

October 2012

From the Laughably Absurd Cost Estimates File

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment

Mother Jones is pushing this rather ridiculous claim:

A global effort to prevent all future species extinctions would cost about $80 billion a year, or $11.42 annually from every person on the planet, according to a study published last week in Science.

The study, released in conjunction with the 11th meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) currently underway in Hyderabad, India, is intended to support goals and commitments to halting extinctions and preserving nature by the year 2020 that the world’s governments have agreed to under the convention.

I don’t need to see their methodology to know that this is absurd. It simply doesn’t pass the laugh test. If such a global program were to be established, I guarantee the costs would balloon and far surpass the $80 billion estimate. They always do.

But even if it could be done for a reasonable price, why in the world would we want to? What hubris it is to presume that we should take a snapshot of nature just as it exists today and keep it that way for all time!

Species have come and gone for as long as life has existed on this planet. What drives us to turn this dynamic process into a static one, and why do people believe that would be an improvement?

It reminds me of the folks who bemoan job losses to technological change that increases productivity, such as the President’s blaming of ATMs, as if a static economy is in any way desirable to a dynamic one.

Saturday

13

October 2012

Stop-and-Frisk is Bad Policy

Written by , Posted in Culture & Society, Liberty & Limited Government, The Courts, Criminal Justice & Tort

On Tuesday The Nation released audio recorded by a victim of police harassment and abuse under New York’s Stop and Frisk program. The officers in the recording behaved as brutish thugs lording their power over the populace, instead of servants of public. Listen to the 2 minutes of audio for yourself here, or for an even better look into the issue (which includes the audio) watch this short documentary:

The Nation also provided this description of the encounter:

In the course of the two-minute recording, the officers give no legally valid reason for the stop, use racially charged language and threaten Alvin with violence. Early in the stop, one of the officers asks, “You want me to smack you?” When Alvin asks why he is being threatened with arrest, the other officer responds, “For being a fucking mutt.” Later in the stop, while holding Alvin’s arm behind his back, the first officer says, “Dude, I’m gonna break your fuckin’ arm, then I’m gonna punch you in the fuckin’ face.”

(more…)

Saturday

6

October 2012

Overgovernment: Regulatory Racket Edition

Written by , Posted in Big Government, The Nanny State & A Regulated Society

New York continues to lead the way down the path toward tyranny, with petty bureaucrats running up to any business they can find and saying “That’s a fine small business you have there, shame if something were to ‘appen to it:”

The city continues to blitz merchants with ridiculous fines — raking in cash for scuffed cutting boards, too-short napkins and failure to recognize the medicinal properties of ChapStick.

“It’s not about protecting the consumer or the food. This is a money racket for the city,” said Declan Morrison, owner of Blackwater Inn in Forest Hills, Queens.

A Health Department inspector recently spent several hours looking for ticket-worthy violations, before spotting five thermometers in the pub’s refrigerator.

“The inspector said, ‘This is way too many thermometers,’ and docked me points,” said Morrison, who also owns the nearby Tap House.

But on paper, the offense read, “Accurate thermometer not provided,” a fine of $300. The charge was later dropped, but Morrison said he has forked over about $20,000 in fines in the past year.

…Leslie Barnes, owner of London Lennie’s in Queens, said he was fined $300 for having too many marks on his cutting boards. Now he spends $2,000 on backup boards each year.

Consumer Affairs Department inspectors charged a Ditmas Park barber $650 this year for using an antique register that didn’t print receipts and for posting different prices for men’s and women’s haircuts.

Can we end now the fiction that large regulatory states exist to protect the people? They do not. They exist to enrich the coffers and enhance the power of government officials.

This sort of behavior is nothing more than legalized gangsterism – pay your masters or something bad will happen to you. It has no place in a free society.

Saturday

6

October 2012

California's Self-Imposed Gas Crisis

Written by , Posted in Big Government, Energy and the Environment

California shoots itself in the foot again with its overzealous regulatory culture:

Drivers in Southern California awoke Friday to find that their gasoline prices had spiked by nearly 20 cents a gallon overnight as a result of fuel shortages caused by a series of refinery disruptions in recent weeks.

Supplies of refined petroleum products on the West Coast are now at their lowest levels since 2008, while national inventories are about normal.

The immediate cause of the California price rise was a power failure at Exxon Mobil’s Torrance, Calif., refinery on Monday that shut down some production units at the 150,000-barrel-a-day facility. The company on Friday said the refinery had resumed normal operations. Supplies on the West Coast had already been tight because of an Aug. 6 fire at Chevron’s 245,000-barrel-a-day Richmond, Calif., refinery, which has still not been restored to full production.

Fires and power outages, surely I can’t be blaming the government for that, right? Well, no, but keep reading:

California typically has substantially higher gasoline prices than most of the country because of its tough environmental regulations and high taxes. Gasoline supplies are traditionally tight this time of year as refiners do maintenance work to switch from summer to fall gasoline blends mandated by the California pollution-reduction regulations. But this year, energy experts say, the local gasoline market is particularly chaotic because of the refinery shutdowns.

So here’s the thing. Supply disruptions happen in lots of industries. A localized disruption in a single state wouldn’t normally cause such shortages, but in this case, government is both contributing to the disruption itself – through the alternating mandated blends – and the inability for it to be resolved through reallocation of supply. Specifically, the reason California is seeing no relief from the rest of the country, which is not experiencing any shortage, is because California’s government says those supplies aren’t good enough.

Perhaps they are right and the costs are justified, but Californian’s should understand that this is the price to be paid for their environmental regulation. They aren’t just abstractions or imposed only on evil oil refiners, but instead place real burdens on ordinary Californians struggling to fill their tanks to get to work each day.

Saturday

29

September 2012

How Will Economic Freedom Fare in Honduras?

Written by , Posted in Free Markets

Would you want to live in a city with no income, sales or capital gains taxes? Well you can soon move to Honduras and get your chance:

Small government and free-market capitalism are about to get put to the test in Honduras, where the government has agreed to let an investment group build an experimental city with no taxes on income, capital gains or sales.

Proponents say the tiny, as-yet unnamed town will become a Central American beacon of job creation and investment, by combining secure property rights with minimal government interference.

“Once we provide a sound legal system within which to do business, the whole job creation machine – the miracle of capitalism – will get going,” Michael Strong,  CEO of the MKG Group, which will build the city and set its laws, told FoxNews.com.

Strong said that the agreement with the Honduran government states that the only tax will be on property.

“Our goal is to be the most economically free entity on Earth,” Strong said.

The only restriction is a requirement to employ a minimum proportion of native Hondurans, which seems a small price to pay for what will otherwise be yet another model example for how free markets promote prosperity.

It’s not exactly like we lack such evidence now. Hong Kong was created as a trade colony and become very prosperous under a free market system that emphasized low taxes, limited regulation and free trade. The Heritage Index of Economic Freedom, led by Hong Kong, is topped by economic success stories.

Granted, I’m not saying the Honduran city is guaranteed to be an economic success. That will depend, among other things, on how soundly they implement their legal system. But if they adhere to the principles of limited government and free markets, prosperity will likely follow. Though there’s always a risk that Honduran politicians see it starting to succeed and try to raid the cookie jar, because if there’s one thing that’s universally true about politicians, it’s that they’ll eventually try grabbing anything and everything within reach of their greedy little hands.

Monday

24

September 2012

Are Republicans Dumb Enough to Support a Carbon Tax?

Written by , Posted in Energy and the Environment, Taxes

When it comes to taxes, Republicans really do play the stupid party to the Democrats’ evil. If Democrats propose raising taxes, Republicans trip over themselves to offer to sharp contrast by offering to raise taxes a bit less. CF&P President Andrew Quinlan highlighted the latest example of this strategic brilliance in Forbes:

[I]t’s not just those on the left pushing for the tax. A few conservatives and Republicans are also quixotically jumping on the bandwagon.

The American Enterprise Institute, for instance, has recently hosted a series of events designed to brainstorm ways to sell the public, and in particular small government conservatives, on the idea of a tax on carbon. Former GOP Congressman Bob Inglis, who proposed a carbon tax bill while in Congress before he was defeated by a Tea Party primary challenger, has teamed up with supply side economist Art Laffer and created a new institute to push for carbon taxes.

The motives of the left in pushing for a tax are easy to understand, they want more “revenue” to spend. …The conservatives, in contrast, claim to want only a revenue neutral tax, trading carbon taxes for reductions in other, more economically destructive, tax rates, such as on income. In theory this is not a bad argument, but in practice it is rather naive.

If the political climate was such that cap-and-trade or other big government carbon regulations were on the horizon, proffering a more economically efficient carbon tax as an alternative might not be a bad strategy from a do-the-wrong-thing-in-the-least-destructive-fashion perspective. But that is not the case. Cap-and-trade is currently a nonstarter, and if the legislative will existed to undo destructive EPA carbon regulations – such as a proposed cap on carbon emissions for new energy plants – then it wouldn’t be necessary to even offer an alternative. After all, none on the left who otherwise support these EPA regulations are going to trade them away, even for a new tax.

More generally, the very idea of offering a new tax in exchange for lower rates elsewhere is flawed. Even if leftists agree to lower taxes on income to keep a new carbon tax revenue neutral, there’s nothing to stop them from raising rates in the future. On the other hand, given the love politicians have for taxes, eliminating an entire tax would be much harder…

He goes on to explain how the logic for a carbon tax doesn’t work even if you assume high-end estimates for the costs of carbon emissions, a point bolstered now by a new study in the journal Nature Climate Change:

A typical export from Western countries to developing giants is machine tools, which are then used to make products such as toys.

These machines are made in the West using comparatively low-carbon industrial techniques.

But when they are plugged in and used, they are usually powered by coal-fired electricity, the dirtiest of the main fossil fuels.

In such conditions, a carbon tax would be counter-productive.

To do so could prompt the developing country to make its own machines, which are likely to be more energy-intensive. This in turn would drive up the carbon tax on what was manufactured.

That is likely just scratching at the surface of the unintended consequences a carbon tax would produce. Though its intended consequence – raising the price of energy – is bad enough by itself to warrant rejecting this latest foray into bipartisan economic destruction.

Friday

14

September 2012

Administration Pressures YouTube in Effort to Censor Anti-Islam Video

Written by , Posted in Culture & Society, Foreign Affairs & Policy, Government Meddling

Continuing to place blame in the wrong places for the latest violent outburst to sweep across the Middle East, the Obama administration has apparently asked YouTube to take down the trailer for “Innocence of Muslims,” a shoddy, amateur looking film taking aim at Islam (Hat-tip: Reason):

The trailer has been blamed for inciting violence in Libya, Egypt and Yemen. Obama administration officials said Thursday that they have asked YouTube to review the video and determine whether it violates the site’s terms of service, according to people close to the situation but not authorized to comment.

Some media observers predict that the incident will prompt calls for Google Inc.’s YouTube to play a more active role in curating the billions of hours of videos found on its site. One prominent 1st Amendment lawyer even suggested that YouTube should seek a judge’s ruling about whether to remove potentially incendiary content.

Other digital media experts, however, cited the technical limitations of scouring the torrent of videos that are uploaded to the site every minute and making value judgments about those likely to incite anger, hate or murder.

YouTube is a private company, so of course has the right to accept or reject videos as they see fit. Though in turn they can be criticized for it if people perceive the process to be arbitrary or biased, which could provide an opening for a potential competitor. But for the government to make such a request is downright sinister and clearly violates the principle of free speech.

The Obama administration request may not have had an explicit or even intended threat of force behind it, but that’s largely irrelevant. The government is too big and too powerful for any request ever to just be a request. When a mafia boss asks you to do something, he doesn’t need to make a threat. Everyone will perceive it to be there just the same, even in the unlikely event that he didn’t intend any punishment for refusal. With the government antitrust goons sharpening their knives and practically drooling over the prospect of subjecting YouTube-owner Google to the same witch hunt they launched at Microsoft in the 90’s, it would be hard for YouTube  not to see the potential repercussions for refusing this “request.” That they have so far not bowed to the pressure is a point in their favor.

The quoted article goes on to cite “technological limitations” to policing user submitted content in a vain attempt to protect delicate sensibilities from any potential umbrage. But what about the philosophical limitations? Why is it Google’s responsibility to keep unwanted content from people’s eyes? If not ever being offended is so important to people, then they can go live in a cabin in the woods and hide from the outside world – as that’s the only way to accomplish it.

That the LA Times couldn’t find any potential objection, other than practical considerations, either to the administration’s behavior or the imagined “calls for Google Inc.’s YouTube to play a more active role in curating the billions of hours of videos found on its site” says as much about their quality of journalism as the whole affair says about this administration’s respect for fundamental First Amendment rights.

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →

About Me

profileI serve as Vice President of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, a non-profit think tank dedicated to preserving tax competition and free markets. This site features my personal views, which are not reflective of CF&P.

Search Site

Categories

Archives