What the future needs!

Via the Washington Post: The federal government has awarded more than $107 billion in contract payments, grants and other benefits over the past decade to foreign and multinational American companies while they were doing business in Iran, despite Washington’s efforts to discourage investment there, records show .

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation: The Department of Defense has released more than 800 heavily-redacted pages of intelligence oversight reports, detailing activities that its Inspector General has “reason to believe are unlawful.”

From Carpe Diem: Bottom Line: Artificially raising wages for unskilled workers reduces the demand for those workers at the same time that it increases the number of unskilled workers looking for work, which results in an excess supply of unskilled workers. Period. And another term for an "excess supply of unskilled workers" is an "increase in the teenage jobless rate." Despite the wishful thinking of politicians and labor unions, the laws of supply and demand are not optional.

Carpe Diem quotes Thomas Sowell: If medical insurance simply covered risks-- which is what insurance is all about-- that would be far less expensive than covering completely predictable things like annual checkups. Far more people could afford medical insurance, thereby reducing the ranks of the uninsured. How the incentives create a political failure that gets labeled as market failure: But all the political incentives are for politicians to create mandates forcing insurance companies to cover an ever increasing range of treatments, and thereby forcing those who buy insurance to pay ever higher premiums to cover the costs of these mandates. That way, politicians can play Santa Claus and make insurance companies play Scrooge. It is great political theater.

The Galen Institute makes the following observation: The City of Alexandria, Virginia, requires residents to shovel their sidewalks after a snowstorm. There is a small city park in Old Town Alexandria a short distance from the Galen Institute’s offices. This sidewalk never has been shoveled, making it virtually impassable with two feet of ice and snow, forcing people to walk in the street -- which is neither safe nor convenient. The city isn’t going to give a ticket to itself of course, and therefore, it doesn’t have to comply with its own rules. Meanwhile, the rest of us (or our loved ones) spend hours and hours shoveling.