Jun
15
2009

URLs du Jour

2009-06-15

  • Those of us with a generally libertarian bent can always use a reminder of why today's GOP is so deserving of scorn and ridicule. Today's reminder is from Chris Edwards at Cato@Liberty:
    As I note in my New York Post op-ed today, Republicans are fond of implying that President Obama is a big-spending socialist. But the House GOP recently offered a spending cut plan that was able to find savings worth less than one percent of Obama's budget.

    As Tad DeHaven and Brian Riedl have also pointed out, the GOP spending reform effort is rather pathetic. It proposed specific annual budget cuts of about $14 billion per year.

    Edwards goes on to point out that the Democrat-leaning Brookings Institution proposed a "smaller government plan" a few years back that cut $342 billion in annual spending. If the GOP can't at least propose something comparable, they should just give up. The Obama-Lite approach will just not cut it.

  • Nobel economist Gary Becker detects the hubris behind the Obama administration's "Pay Czar" scheme: the Hayekian "fatal conceit" …
    … hat government officials can effectively determine prices and production through various forms of central planning without having the incentives and information available to firms in competitive markets. A closely related conceit is behind the belief that someone sitting in Washington can determine the pay to hundreds of executives and other employees.
    Having government bureaucrats dictate compensation levels is a bit of brain-dead populism that might play well politically, but like the price controls of the 1970s we'll wind up with "unintended consequences." (Via AmSpecBlog.)

  • Spot the silly error in this (otherwise) good story from my local paper. (Hint: paragraph three.)