Your host Richard Morrison and co-hosts William Yeatman and Jeremy Lott conspire to bring you Episode 67 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We start with the looming off-year elections, the unexpected lack of tropical storms and a cash for kids scandal in Pennsylvania. We finish with the fall of a spam king and the swine that didn’t squeal.

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Join Richard Morrison, Jeremy Lott, William Yeatman and special guest Ryan Radia for Episode 66 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We start with the lobbying war over net neutrality rules, Sen. Kerry’s search for a cap-and-trade legacy and a campaign finance scandal from Japan. We then move on to the White House’s War on Commerce and the allegedly immoral profits in the healthcare insurance industry.

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This week, host Richard Morrison and guest-host Jeremy Lott bring you Episode 65 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We start with an interview with CEI Senior Fellow Gregory Conko about Congress’ health care debacles. Energy Policy Analyst William Yeatman then joins in to discuss avoiding another housing crisis, California’s proposed ban on big screen TVs, the Abramoff scandal’s latest jailing, and the FTC’s war against free speech.

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James Buchanan was one of the founding fathers of public choice theory, along with Gordon Tullock and some others (Bill Niskanen, Mancur Olson, et al). Public choice, despite the obscure name, is quite simple. It says that market behavior does not end where government begins. Politicians and other government actors are not angels. They are just as self-interested as you or I. Public choices are subject to the same incentives as private choices.

Buchanan’s simple, powerful insight won him the economics…

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Your host Richard Morrison and guest co-hosts William Yeatman and Ryan Young conspire to bring you Episode 64 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We start with the big vote on health care legislation, squeezing more energy from the ground and the warming that wasn’t there. We continue with the British expense scandal, and the Obama administration’s love for new rules and regulations.

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Congratulations to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson. Both are highly deserving.

Ostrom’s work shows that market behavior emerges in settings not usually thought of as markets (condo associations, within government etc.).

Williamson has made brilliant contributions to the New Institutional Economics (NIE), which says that changing the rules of the game (the existing institutions) will alter the behavior of the people affected. Williamson’s work applies the economic way of thinking to deduce exactly how, with an emphasis on how transaction costs affect…

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People buy less of something when it becomes more expensive. That’s what economists call the law of demand. It is one of the key drivers of every facet of human behavior. And it’s a simple concept. Easy to understand. Easy to apply.

Or maybe it only seems that way. 366 members of Congress just voted to attract tourists to the U.S. by taxing them $10 when they enter the country. Seriously.

The noise you hear may well be Adam Smith rolling over in…

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A new Maryland law makes it illegal for manufacturers to set a minimum retail price for their products in sales contracts. The law is meant to increase competition. Unfortunately, it will have the opposite effect.

As Wayne Crews and I explain in the The American Spectator, it could prevent retailers from competing with each other on non-price grounds, such as customer service, product demonstrations, and advertising.

Some products, such as televisions or cars, have high information costs. Customers want to know a lot…

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Over at the Detroit News, Hans Bader and I explain why corporations have human rights despite not being human. The reason why? Transaction costs.

This has implications for everything from Intel’s EU antitrust battle to newspapers’ free speech rights.

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Here is a letter I sent recently to The Wall Street Journal:

September 22, 2009

Editor, The Wall Street Journal
200 Liberty Street
New York, NY 10281

To the Editor:

Your article “Bad News for Broadband” (editorial, Sept. 22) hints at, but does not make, a key point: net neutrality proposals are driving a wedge between service providers like AT&T and content providers like Google.

Strange, is it not? Their interests are actually closely aligned. If AT&T upgrades its network, Google benefits from the increased bandwidth. If…

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Your host Richard Morrison welcomes guest co-host Jeremy Lott and Editorial Director Ivan Osorio for Episode 63 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We start with CEI’s FOIA fight with the U.S. Treasury, 7-Eleven’s attempt to give consumers a big gulp of government and the solution to a jobless recovery. We then move on to union pension politics, Ireland’s regrettable embrace of EU hegemony and some scantily-clad Olympic News.

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Your host Richard Morrison welcomes returning guest co-host Jeremy Lott of the Capital Research Center and technical producer Ryan Young as special guest commentator for Episode 62 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We start with the semi-proposed allegedly not-a-bailout of the newspaper industry, Steven Chu’s condescending views on energy policy and Google’s copyright troubles in France. We then look at the what soaking the rich has done to New York’s finances, Obama’s presence at the UN and a good old fashioned…

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In today’s New York Times, Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman preens about intellectual dishonesty while presenting the most intellectually dishonest case about the cost of climate change policies I have seen this side of Joe Romm.  It moved me to do something I have not done for some time, and Fisk the entire article.  Krugman’s words are in italics.

So, have you enjoyed the debate over health care reform? Have you been impressed by the civility of the discussion and the intellectual honesty…

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Over at the Washington Examiner’s Opinion Zone, I apply what  I learned back in Economics 101 to the net neutrality debate. It’s all about scarcity.

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In today’s Politico, I take a look at one of the 397 new regulations in the House version of cap and trade legislation. If the bill passes, almost all homes for sale would be required to undergo an environmental inspection. The home cannot be sold until it is up to code.

One unintended consequence could be the end of fixer-upper homes.

Another would be lower home ownership rates. Which, of course, directly contradicts of decades of federal policy.

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Your host Richard Morrison welcomes returning guest co-host William Yeatman and special guest commenter Ryan Radia to the program for Episode 61 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We start with the FCC’s just-announced proposal for “net neutrality,” Treasury documents that reveal the true cost of cap-and-trade legislation and the plan for getting over California’s great depression. We then move on to the G20 Summit’s potential path to prosperity and the ever-expanding scandal that is ACORN.

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“Public spending is always a substitute for private spending, and that consequently it may well support one worker in place of another, but adds nothing to the lot of the working class as a whole.”

-Frederic Bastiat, Selected Essays on Political Economy, p. 16 (emphasis in original)

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Host Richard Morrison and co-host Jeremy Lott welcome special guests Lee Doren and Greg Conko to Episode 60 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We start with a recap of the 9/12 D.C. Tax Protest, look into union rules that hurt minority contractors and consider the alleged ethics violations of former California Assemblyman Mike Duvall. We then turn to Greg Conko for his thoughts on free market healthcare reform and finish with a tribute to The Greatest Man Who Ever Lived, Norman…

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Intel’s defense in its EU antitrust case has taken the surprising line that the company’s human rights were violated. Over at Real Clear Markets, CEI colleague Hans Bader and I take a closer look. We conclude that Intel actually has a pretty good argument.

Corporations have human rights because doing so greatly reduces transaction costs: “suppose your company wants to buy some computer chips from Intel. You could have each shareholder sign the sales contract - good luck finding them all -…

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