The Fed has cut interest rates again, reducing its key rate to 2 percent — a real interest rate of less than zero, after taking into account inflation.  It will be about as ineffective (in stimulating the economy) as pushing on a string.  But it will trigger renewed inflationary pressures.  International investors are already disgusted with the Fed’s inflationary attempts to bail out borrowers by chopping interest rates, and this will make them even more reluctant to invest in the U.S.

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Steven Dubner asks whether children are responsible for the recent explosion of environmental concern.

He’s got a point. As well as the decidedly non-secular holiday of Earth Day, which appears to be celebrated at every public school in the US, my daughter’s Brownie troop was assigned a project recently to learn about a foreign country. As well as learning about famous people, landmarks and so on, they had to tell the other Brownies “how they are green.” Hmmmm.

Yet this example of pester…

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The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the federal law (PLCAA) limiting lawsuits against gun manufacturers over acts committed by criminals with guns, overturning a ruling by radical judge Jack Weinstein gutting the law.  (I earlier discussed how judicial case assignment procedures are manipulated so that the lion’s share of landmark cases in New York’s Eastern District mysteriously end up being decided by Judge Weinstein rather than his more moderate colleagues). 

The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence has claimed that the law violates “separation…

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Cordelia Ashton is an angry woman; she feels that her insurance company is treating her unfairly. She feels this way because once her insurance company found out that she’d been keeping three horses on her property, they gave her an ultimatum: get rid of the horses, or we’re dropping your policy.

For her part, Ashton said she wouldn’t be able to afford a higher insurance premium if she had to look for another provider.

“Everything is high enough as it is,” Ashton…

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In the Washington Post, Robert Samuelson’s column “Start Drilling“ points out that ethanol production is far worse for the environment than drilling for oil in Alaska’s Arctic tundra, yet Congress promotes ethanol subsidies to reduce our reliance on foreign oil, even as it blocks drilling in the Arctic and ”the Atlantic and Pacific coasts” that would do far more to reduce our reliance on foreign oil.   “What keeps these areas closed are exaggerated environmental fears, strong prejudice against oil companies and sheer stupidity,” he writes.

A news story today in…

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If you ever thought that governmental economic planning or market manipulation is a useful tool, take a look at this article in today’s Washington Post on the impact of ethanol subsidies and mandates.   It underscores the fact that governments are much better at making mistakes and serving political interests than they are at solving problems!  CEI’s energy analysts warned (see here, here and here, for example) about such folly, but politicians apparently are not prone to reason. 

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Michigan CPS workers seized a 7-year-old who drank lemonade that his father purchased for him without knowing that it contained a small amount of alcohol.  (As Ted Frank notes, when CPS seized the child, he had no alcohol in his system).  They put him in foster care for two days and refused to release him to his aunts.  Then they released him to his mother on the condition that his father, an archaeology professor, move out of the house until a full court hearing could be held.  After that later…

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The unintended consequences of government are wonderful to behold.  Impose a minimum wage and put poor, ill-educated teens out of work.  Raise auto fuel-economy requirements, and kill more people in accidents as they travel in smaller cars.  Ban cigarette smoking in local bars and restaurants, and cause more drunk driving accidents as smokers drive further to find more congenial locales.

Reports the Economist:

The problem with this, say Scott Adams and Chad Cotti, economists at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is that smoking bans seem…

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The American Bar Association is continually threatening to pull the accreditation of George Mason University Law School for failing to adopt illegal racial quotas in admissions.  That’s what San Diego law professor (and member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission) Gail Heriot notes in the Wall Street Journal.  The ABA first forced GMU — one of the few law schools without a marked liberal bias — to use what the ABA itself refers to as “preferential affirmative action admissions program” to radically increase…

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I’ve just got back from delivering a speech at the Heritage Foundation on the subject of my book. I think it went well and the audience certainly seemed enthusiastic about it. You’ll be able to watch it here when the webcast gets properly archived within a day or so. Thanks to ever-excellent John Hilboldt and his team for putting it on and to Ben Lieberman for hosting it.

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The Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s voter ID law, which is tougher than many other voter ID laws, rejecting claims that it was unconstitutional or akin to a poll tax, and ruling that it was a rational way of preventing vote fraud.  I earlier explained why the legal challenges to voter ID laws are based on bogus arguments.  The case did not break down along ideological lines: while all the moderate and conservative justices voted to uphold the law, so did liberal Justice…

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The proposed “Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act” would get rid of the short 180-day deadline for bringing pay discrimination claims that applies under some federal laws, like Title VII.  As I point out in today’s New York Times, that’s unnecessary, since another law, the Equal Pay Act, has a longer 3-year deadline for bringing claims (and other discrimination laws like 42 USC 1981 often have even longer deadlines, like 4 years).  My letter disagreeing with the New York Times’ editorial in support of the law…

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Cellulosic ethanol—derived from wood scraps and other forms of inedible plant mass– may or may not turn out to be a real technological breakthrough.  On the one hand, it could reduce the ruinous impacts of grain-based ethanol on food prices.  On the other hand, the extensive set of federal mandates and subsidies for cellulosic ethanol is not a good omen—good technologies rarely need federal help, and the existence of federal aid is often a tip-off that a new technology is…

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A Chicago Tribune story notes that a few jurisdictions now ban discrimination against fat people (generally as part of general bans on discrimination based on physical appearance), and that Massachusetts is now considering specifically banning discrimination against fat people (as some municipalities do).  (The only federal law touching on the subject is the Americans with Disabilities Act, which some courts have said may cover “morbid obesity” (see Cook v. Rhode Island), but which does not cover ordinary fatness; moreover, some courts say that obesity is not a…

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One of the most tragic manifestations of past racial discrimination has been the creation of a government-enforced racial spoils system in the name of affirmative action.  That has given rise to a professional class of racial profiteers, such as the late Ron Brown, who are ever ready to help whites win the financial benefit of regulations originally approved to aid minorities.

The demand on people and institutions to abandon the principle of nondiscrimination has been particularly strong in academia.  Although the U.S. Supreme Court has…

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Doug,

Although I sympathize with your point of view, I think that your post about HSAs misses the fact that the HSAs we have right now were, basically, set up to fail. The Democrats’ proposal is, in the current context, pretty sensible. In fact, I believe that many people opposed to the idea of HSAs didn’t mind for the version of HSAs we passed in the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act because specifically because it’s so lame and will prove that HSAs “don’t…

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CNN founder and noted “Mouth of the South” Ted Turner recently claimed that he was doing better keeping his foot out of his mouth.  He hadn’t said anything “stupid” for ages, he explained.

Except in the same interview, when he exclaimed:

If steps aren’t taken to stem global warming, “We’ll be eight degrees hotter in 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow,” Turner said during a wide-ranging, hour-long interview with PBS’s Charlie Rose that aired Tuesday.

“Most of…

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Though a bit late in figuring things out, the steel industry in the European Union and a steel workers’ union have said that the EU’s proposals to cut CO2 emissions will have a devastating effect on their industry. According to a Reuters article today,

Europe’s steel industry joined forces with a workers’ union on Monday to warn that European Union efforts to curb climate change could put tens of thousands of steel industry jobs at risk.

The EU aims to cut CO2 emissions…

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But were afraid to ask can be found in Chapter Two of The Really Inconvenient Truths, which you can now get for free via this site. I’ll be on the Jim Bohannon Show tonight at 10pm talking about this and many other things the left doesn’t want you to know about the environment.

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The U.S. Department of Agriculture features a Colombia “tariff ticker” on its website to illustrate in money terms how the pending U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement will benefit U.S. exports.  Currently, under preferential agreements, virtually all Colombian goods enter the U.S. duty-free, while U.S. exports face tariffs averaging 14 percent — and up to 80 percent for certain agricultural products, according to the U.S. Trade Representative.

The Colombia FTA will change that.  Tariffs on most U.S. products exported to Colombia would be…

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