Monthly Archives: June 2009

Regulation of the Day 1: Taxpayer-Funded Advertising for Mushrooms

Posted on June 5, 2009 | Comments Off on Regulation of the Day 1: Taxpayer-Funded Advertising for Mushrooms

This is the first installment of an occasional series that shines a little light on what the regulatory state is up to.

Today’s Regulation of the Day comes to us from the Agricultural Marketing Service (5,500 employees, $1.3 billion 2008 budget). Farmers are apparently unique among businesses in being unable to promote themselves, and therefore need help from the federal government.

Page 26,984 of the 2009 Federal Register contains a proposed rule titled “Amendments to Mushroom Promotion, Research, and Consumer Information Order and Referendum Order.”

Basically, large mushroom producers will vote in a referendum to decide if they like proposed changes in federal mushroom policy. Also at issue is membership apportionment on the all-important Mushroom Council.

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Posted in Public Choice, Regulation of the Day

Twenty Years since Tiananmen Square

Posted on June 4, 2009 | Comments Off on Twenty Years since Tiananmen Square

China is a very different place than it was twenty years ago. It was on this day in 1989 that one anonymous, brave soul halted those tanks in their tracks during the Tiananmen Square protests.

Slow but steady economic liberalization has lifted as many as half a billion people out of poverty in China since Mao’s death. Most of that progress has happened since the Tiananmen massacre. And the process has accelerated in recent years.

Economist Alex Tabarrok, speaking at a TED conference, described China’s new economic freedom as “the world’s greatest antipoverty program of the past three decades.”

But not everything has changed since Tiananmen. China still does not have a free press. There is no freedom of speech or religion. In many ways, the Chinese government is as repressive as ever. If China is to be a great nation again, it must be free. If the Chinese people follow the peaceful example of the Tiananmen Tank Man, it will happen.

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Posted in History

An Alternative Stimulus

Posted on June 3, 2009 | Comments Off on An Alternative Stimulus

Wayne Crews and I have a piece in today’s Detroit News with some ideas for getting the economy back on track.

The key line: “Doing business in America is becoming very expensive. No wonder there is less of it.”

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Posted in Economics, Publications, regulation, Stimulus