As Congressional energy bills make energy (and transportation) progressively more expensive, it’s worth recalling that it was cars (and carpooling) that made Martin Luther King’s Montgomery bus boycott viable.  For many black people in Montgomery, that was the only transportation alternative to the segregated buses that demeaned them.  Technological and economic progress was key to breaking down entrenched segregation in the Deep South.

In today’s Washington Times, Niger Innis, head of the Congress of Racial Equality, points to the continuing importance of the economic progress made…

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Texas’s Child Protective Services (CPS), which the state supreme court ruled acted illegally in seizing more than 400 children, repeatedly abused children, according to mental health workers that CPS itself invited to observe the children.  For example, “A baby was left in a stroller without food and water for 24 hours and ended up in the hospital.”  “Women were constantly lied to about where their children [were] and when they could see their lawyers and about when they would be reunited with their…

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Last week, I discovered a bizarre requirement for a fingerprint registrty in housing legislation that had just passed the Senate Banking Committee. In an OpenMarket post last Friday, I wrote that the provison had “almost escape[d] without notice.”

I am now heartened to write that the database provision has now generated plenty of notice and interest. OpenMarket has gotten over 100,000 hits on this post, and, at last count, 375 concerned readers have posted comments. The post was linked to by the…

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Contrary to popular belief, regulators tend to be very clever people. They know the rules of the game, and they know to how to use them to their advantage.

The latest example of bureaucratic perfidy is a recent decision by EU officials to raise tariffs on some high-tech goods from the United States. This doesn’t seem like a smart policy at first glance. It will make goods more expensive for European consumers. The tariffs might also be a violation of the…

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The Greenlining Institute, which is funded by money diverted from class-action lawsuits brought in the name of consumers, is now lobbying the California legislature to enact an intrusive law that would force charities to report on the race, sex, and sexual orientation of their board members, staffs, and suppliers in the name of “diversity.”  Thanks to the far-left ideology of California’s legislature, the bill, which has already passed the California Assembly on a party-line vote, will likely become law unless Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoes it. 

I earlier wrote in the…

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The Texas Supreme Court has just affirmed an appeals court ruling that Texas’s Child Protective Services (CPS) illegally seized more than 400 children whose parents belong to a strange religious sect.   CPS cared poorly for the children it seized.  Three children of one couple became ill and had to be hospitalized, while another couple’s 2-year-old daughter apparently suffered from “severe dehydration and malnutrition” after being seized.   As Jacob Sullum noted in Reason, “There was never any evidence that their parents abused them, but there’s plenty that the state did.” …

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Ethanol subsidies are contributing to worldwide hunger.  Islamic extremist groups are exploiting that hunger by tying food aid to anti-Western political indoctrination.  (Ethanol mandates drive up skyrocketing food prices that result in starvation, riots, and unrest across the Third World, as well as environmental devastation.)

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The Supreme Court made up some new laws on Tuesday because it thought they were a good idea, as the Washington Post’s editorial today notes.

Some civil rights laws not only ban discrimination, but also retaliation against those who complain about what they perceive to be discrimination.  Others just ban discrimination, and say nothing about retaliation.

In two cases it decided on Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled that civil-rights laws don’t even need to mention retaliation to ban it, since retaliation is a kind…

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State Child Protective Services (CPS) are increasingly seizing children from their parents for trivial reasons or over baseless, anonymous allegations, as the Washington Examiner describes today in several related articles.  One article discusses how Washington, D.C. continues to treat the Caplans as child-abusers even though “five doctors confirmed that an injury sustained by one of their twin daughters was not caused by abuse,” and how an Arlington couple permanently lost custody of their child even though they “had been exonerated by of all…

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Texas Child Protective Services (CPS) illegally seized 465 children from parents in a religious sect based on an anonymous, fabricated allegation by a woman outside the sect pretending to be a member.  The state appeals court recently ruled against the seizure of many of those children.

As Jacob Sullum notes, while CPS justified its actions by citing the sect’s ”pervasive belief system” (which favors early marriage and approves of polygamy), it seized even the children of adult, monogamous married couples, and even some adults mistakenly branded as minors. …

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I wonder what Matt Welch means when he accuses Czech President Vaclav Klaus of “resisting most efforts to come to public (let alone legal) terms with the Communist crimes of the past.” Klaus is a strong longtime supporter of the Czech policy known as “lustration,” which, “forbids [communist secret police] StB agents and their informers, as well as senior Communist Party officials, members of paramilitary units and intelligence agents, from holding high government posts.”

That may not be the most democratic policy,…

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Barack Obama says he would keep in place the 47-year old Cuban trade embargo if elected President. CNN says Obama views the trade restrictions as “leverage to push for democratic change on the island.”

Yes, those sanctions have been so effective. Just look at how much freer Cuba has become since the embargo began. (Pardon the sarcasm.)

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What can you say about a health care system that treats animals more quickly than humans?  Reports Macleans:

Dr. Danny Joffe is only half joking when he says that if he’d fallen asleep on the last day of vet school in Saskatoon and woken up some two decades later in his current workplace, he would not have believed it was an animal hospital. Joffe is one of 11 specialists at the C.A.R.E. Centre, a 28,000-sq.-foot palace of veterinary medicine built two…

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The Washington Examiner has an editorial today titled “Environmentalism is not about the Environment.”  Indeed.  The title says it all.  When most Americans say they are environmentalists, they express the simple desire for clean air, clean water, and an appreciation for wildlife.  But today’s environmental movement is much more focused on expanding government controls and bureaucracy than anything else.  Much of what they advocate unnecessary and needlessly expensive.  The impact on freedom and the economy is far greater than most people realize.  If…

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The Washington Examiner has an interesting editorial today called “Environmentalism Isn’t About the Environment.”  It describes how environmental measures expand and metastasize government power in ways that have little to do with protecting the environment.  It points to a wetlands bill pending in Congress that would define every “prairie pothole,” ”sandflat,” or ”isolated basin” in America as a federally-regulated wetland that that cannot be developed or used without approval from federal bureaucrats under the Clean Water Act.

Very often, environmental measures backfire, harming the environment and causing tragedy, as CEI’s Iain Murray…

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In the Washington Examiner, Daniel Ballon and Lawrence McQuillan criticize a bill pending in Congress that would lead to credit card companies reducing their rebates to credit card holders.  It would restrict the fees the companies can contractually charge retailers to process payments from their cardholders, leaving them with less margin to pass on to consumers.  Right now, I receive up to 5 percent in rebates from my credit cards for the purchases I make, but if this bill passes, those rebates will surely fall,…

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In the National Review, Timothy Lynch explains how Texas’s Child Protective Services ignored state law and common sense in seizing 465 children from members of a strange religious sect that advocates polygamy (FLDS).  Texas’s CPS, he says, overreached in many ways, treating lawful teenage marriages as sexual abuse, parents as guilty until proven innocent, and the sect’s religious teachings as emotional abuse per se.  CPS also interfered with parents’ right to counsel, he says.  As he notes, “A Texas appeals court ruled Thursday that Texas’s Child…

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The federal government massively subsidizes corn-based ethanol production, even though it consumes as much energy as it generates, thus doing nothing to cut greenhouse gas emissions.  Yet the federal government imposes a tariff on imported ethanol that prevents costly ethanol mandates from being satisfied by less wasteful forms of ethanol production overseas.  In today’s Washington Post, Paul O’Connell criticizes the “U.S. tariff of 54 cents a gallon” that keeps imported sugar ethanol, which has a better “energy savings ratio” than corn ethanol, out of the U.S.   Environmental advocates like New…

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Mose Americans realize that Washington is dysfunctional and perverse.  So is Washington, D.C.  The city has long been unfriendly to business, encouraging enterprises to locate in the suburbs.  Now the city fathers are upping business costs again by mandating paid family leave.  Such a policy is unfair to all employees except those who take leave, since it shifts rather than expands benefits.  And the law will further discourage job creation in the city.

Explains Carrie Lukas of the Independent Women’s Forum:

For the…

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If the last seven years have proved anything on Capitol Hill, it is that there are no fiscal conservatives in Washington.  The bipartisan desire to spend is overwhelming.

Consider the Farm Bill. It’s not obvious why farmers–and not, say writers or engineers–deserve to be subsidized by Uncle Sam.  But it’s crazy to raise crop supports when prices are rising.  Yet that’s what our spendthrift legislators are doing.

Editorializes the Wall Street Journal:

Since the last farm bill in 2002, the price of cotton…

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