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Russ Roberts’ testimony in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is superb. Read it (it’s short). Wall Street deserves plenty of blame for the financial crisis. But Washington deserves more:

When your teenager drives drunk and wrecks the car, and you keep giving him a do-over—
repairing the car and handing him back the keys—he’s going to keep driving
drunk. Washington keeps giving the bad banks and Wall Street firms a do-over. Here are
the keys. Keep driving. The story always…

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Having lived in the Washington, D.C., area for a decade, I’ve found following the goings-on of former D.C. Mayor and current city council member Marion Barry both fascinating and confusing. A skilled politician of dubious achievements, Barry oversaw what many consider one of the worst city administrations in American history, yet he remainis highly popular among his constituents.

Appropriately, Matt Labash’s profile of Marion Barry in The Weekly Standard shows a somewhat more complex figure than the now all-too-familiar caricature of Barry…

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For supporters of freedom and markets, the Year of Our Lord 2008 has been close to a disaster. As D:Ream used to sing, things can only get better, surely? Ah, if only…

This was the year that saw two Presidential candidates vying with each other to see who could make the most ridiculous statements on global warming and the financial system (it may be the less ridiculous won). It was a year when one bunch of free-spending economic know-nothings gained complete…

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Major newspapers around the country including the Washington Post, the LA Times, and the Wall Street Journal are urging President-elect Barack Obama to pass the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement in the lame duck session. The Los Angeles Times said it bluntly, “It’s time to stop playing games with a trade pact whose economic and political benefits are good for both nations.”

Some reports of the meeting between the president-elect and President Bush said that the president had pushed for the trade agreement in exchange…

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If you wanted to communicate over long distances in real-time 25 years ago, you had little choice but to rely on your local phone company for carriage. Email and mobile phones were still oddities, and neither SMS text messages nor tweets had even been conceived.

Federal regulators, concerned that some companies might not maintain a  high level of service, imposed reporting requirements so the FCC could monitor phone companies and ensure calls were being handled properly.

Fast forward to 2008, and the traditional phone company…

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Though the bill may have been defeated for the wrong reasons—like the lack of freebies, giveaways, and handouts that many on the left had hoped for—the defeat of the bailout bill in the House has brought stocks out of their decent. The Dow Jones is now climbing.

But how can this be? How could a bill that was designed to save our economy, our country, and the world be the cause of the Dow’s drop today? Easy, the bill was introducing…

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