Negative Space: bureaucracy
- Back Seat Baby: Have airbags become a Rube Goldberg machine?
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The classic prescriptive mandate is the airbag. Bulky, expensive, undeniably useful, and we have no idea what far better ideas airbags crowd out of our vehicles.
- Big government demands a nanny state
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Big government ensures that voters will demand a nanny state. They can’t afford not to police their neighbors when they pay for the poor choices their neighbors make.
- The dark side of bureaucratic health care
- The death panel comes in many forms, and is a natural outgrowth of health care managed by government bureaucracy.
- Democrats endorse public school elections, teacher recalls?
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Should legislators and teachers be evaluated for job performance in the same way? A group called Winning Democrats suggests that public school teachers should be elected positions rather than tenured, and that teachers should be subject to recall by the communities they serve.
- Fixing unemployment insurance benefits
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True unemployment insurance is ensuring that the motivated unemployed can create their own jobs.
- A grumpy basic income
- John Cochrane has useful thoughts on Charles Murray’s universal basic income, after the Swiss rejected a very different version.
- How to make life easier for car thieves
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Petition for exemption from parts-making requirement 49 CFR part 543, required antitheft devices as standard equipment.
- The Last Defense against Donald Trump?
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When you’ve dismantled every other defense, what’s left except the whining? The fact is, Democrats can easily defend against Trump over-using the power of the presidency. They don’t want to, because they want that power intact when they get someone in.
- Natural monopolies: a 20-minute call for $8.83
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“A 20-minute call anywhere in the country will cost me only $3.33? What’s the catch?” The catch is that those are still outrageous monopolistic prices.
- ObamaCare: it’s a tax, bitches
- Circling closer to the bureaucracy event horizon: now we have to list all the things we don’t do and check to see if we have to pay taxes on not doing them.
- The precarious value of middlemen
- In a world of choice, a middleman must add value (lower prices, ease of delivery) in addition to their added costs (fewer choices, lower quality, etc.) But the costs are always there. Once a middleman is mandated, there is no longer any need to add value.
- The price of politics
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Are the corruptions of powerful government a symptom of the system, or a symptom of the imperfection of man?
- Ryan: End oil subsidies?
- Of course we want to end oil subsidies. Maintaining oil subsidies because gas prices might rise is crazy: we pay for those subsidies, too!
- Why does the EpiPen cost so much?
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With Mylan raising the cost of the EpiPen even as the EpiPen enters the public domain, people are complaining—but they’re complaining in ways that will raise health costs even more.
More Information
- Bureaucracy: Conclusion
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“All such deficiencies are inherent in the performance of services which cannot be checked by money statements of profit and loss.”
- The joys of being a small business owner in Obama’s America
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“The toughest thing we did was layoff our 5 full time employees, working more hours ourselves and bridging the gap with occasional freelancers. The decision was painful, but necessary once we evaluated the impact of Obamacare and rising costs of doing business.… I roll my eyes every time Obama gives a speech about making loans available to businesses—that’s a very bad business plan in a weak economy.”
