The Unbroken Window

Aside from the carbon footprint of thousands of people heading to the Nevada desert and literally “burning the man” there may be something actually illegal about Burning Man. For the uninitiated, Burning Man is a weeklong event that attracts over 40,000 very interesting and eclectic people. You can read lots about it here. As I [...]

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For those of you following, you know that a while back the plaintiffs in the case were caught on camera saying that they “cooked” the science of the oil damages in order to win close to a $20 billion settlement. It gets far more interesting now. Here is Coyote on Tony Soprano Environmentalism: The Ecuadoran [...]

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A canard of the uninformed left is that capitalism leads to monopoly – which of course requires either the elimination of capitalism or the heavily regulation of it by … a … monopoly with guns. And never mind the actual history of anti-trust, which originates in the “Progressive” movement and is now manifest in the [...]

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Please feel free to weigh in. In your religion, does your holy book appear in the pews/aisles/shelves at your version of Mass? As you know I am Catholic and I cannot remember any time in my entire life seeing a Bible or even just a New Testament in a church. As an additional thought this [...]

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I read recently that Amazon.com is working hard to get same day delivery to customers. I am excitedly awaiting that, as I am same day delivery of groceries. I once worked for 4+ years in a small retail establishment, and we quietly told ourselves that we were "better" than Amazon or even our Big Box [...]

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I may just turn this blog into a news feed. It all speaks for itself. I wonder if its because companies have to beg for government permission, and then pay a hefty bribe, to get permission to hire more employees: The city council in Menlo Park, Calif., is set to approve a deal that will let [...]

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Grading’s got me tied up, and Coyote’s on a roll. Here is his retelling of the now (in)famous life of Julia. Do read the whole thing. And someone please try to defend the “opposing position” if you can even characterize it as such. I am all ears. By the time Julia called it quits, she [...]

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I strongly recommend reading Alex Tabarrok’s short e-Book Launching the Innovation Renaissance, which I will blog on shortly. Professor Tabarrok blogs it a little today, here is the entire thing: We like to think of ourselves as an innovation nation but our government is a warfare-welfare state. To build an economy for the 21st century [...]

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One of my favorite essay questions assigned to students in my environmental economics class requires them to think about how government ownership and management of National Parks differs from alternative arrangements. I do not wish to write my version of the essay here. I do want to make a few observations. First, you would be [...]

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Abraham Gesner’s New York Kerosene company, in 1856, began to make kerosene for the purposes of illumination. When it brought that product to market, it did not advertise itself as, “having the potential to save the whales,” though indeed that was its effect. When it did the research on this fuel, it was not the [...]

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