The Unbroken Window

Bob Frank was a professor of mine in graduate school at Cornell. He is perhaps most well known for his argument in favor of a progressive consumption and income tax. Why? He argues that much of the consumption of goods by the rich (and perhaps middle class too) takes place over status competition and “positional” [...]

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And then they came for the Happy Meal toys. The ordinance, which would go into effect in December of next year, prohibits toy giveaways in fast-food children’s meals that have more than 640 milligrams of sodium, 600 calories or 35 percent of their calories from fat. The law also would limit saturated fats and trans [...]

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As if the guys in Albany were elected just to prove everything I say on this site correct: State tax officials, under orders from cash-strapped Albany to ramp up their audit and compliance efforts, have begun to enforce one of the more obscure distinctions within the state’s sales tax law. In New York, the sale [...]

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I do not believe that it is possible to be both a paternalist (libertarian or otherwise) and also be a strong advocate of government schooling. The argument that Thaler and Sunstein make in their book Nudge is that many individuals make bad decisions when left to their own devices because they are short-sighted, ill-informed, undisciplined, [...]

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Salt to possibly be banned in restaurant cooking in NYC. Really. Here is the first in my series. My friend Art Carden writes: Quoth a Facebook friend, in linking this piece about a proposed ban on salt in New York restaurants: “Just when I thought people protesting the trans fat ban using a slippery slope [...]

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Now, it is only safe to go sledding on groomed hills intended specifically for the purpose of sledding. This message came from our local Government school district: Sledding is an exciting pastime when you grow up in Upstate New York. We understand the draw to some of the hills on the PCSD grounds, but we [...]

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Teens don’t really vote, so why should anyone care about what they think of the new teen driver law coming to New York? Sure, teenagers are old enough to go wield a weapon in Iraq and Afghanistan, they are old enough to be permitted to choose whether to go to college or which college to [...]

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Over 20 states have adopted laws requiring youths to wear a helmet when riding a bicycle.    We confirm previous research indicating that these laws reduced fatalities and increased helmet use, but we also show that the laws significantly reduced youth bicycling.  We find this result in standard two-way fixed effects models of parental reports of [...]

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I had a friend who used to mix Mountain Dew (diet of course) with Coffee – maybe he is next on the F.D.A.’s “hit list”: Caffeine may lead people to underestimate how drunk they are, giving drinkers a false sense of confidence that they can perform tasks they are too impaired to undertake. While we’re [...]

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As opposed to using pricing mechanisms to achieve goals is no better illustrated than in this pathetic excuse for a law: “Power-hungry TVs will be banned from store shelves in California after state regulators Wednesday adopted a first-in-the-nation mandate to reduce electricity demand.” Let’s see …we want consumers to reduce electricity use, so rather than [...]

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