The Future of Air Travel?

Posted on October 4, 2011 | Comments Off on The Future of Air Travel?

For thousands of years, no human traveled faster than a horse. Napoleon’s armies were no mobile than Caesar’s. That changed almost overnight with the automobile and then the airplane. Despite that rapid progress, flight times from New York to London have barely budged in 50 years.If anything, it’s slower now that the Concorde is out of service.

That could change in the next 15-20 years with the dawn of space tourism. A spacecraft has to travel about 17,000 miles per hour to stay in orbit. A partnership between KLM airlines and a wealthy Formula One mogul hopes to make first-generational suborbital crafts that can reach 2,200 miles per hour, with an eventual goal of hitting 13,750 miles per hour.

This is good for more than space tourism — a trip from London to Sydney would take an hour and forty five minutes. That’s about the same as a flight today from New York to Chicago.

Caesar and Napoleon would be astonished. Hopefully this venture doesn’t experience the crony capitalism problems that NASA has had with a similar project.

Comments Off on The Future of Air Travel?

Posted in History, Predicting the Future

Tagged , , ,

What if NFL Players Were Paid Like Teachers?

Posted on October 3, 2011 | Comments Off on What if NFL Players Were Paid Like Teachers?

I’m not a big fan of football analogies in politics (think of former Sen. George Allen absurdly carrying a football wherever he went), but Fran Tarkenton has a good one:

Imagine the National Football League in an alternate reality. Each player’s salary is based on how long he’s been in the league. It’s about tenure, not talent. The same scale is used for every player, no matter whether he’s an All-Pro quarterback or the last man on the roster. For every year a player’s been in this NFL, he gets a bump in pay. The only difference between Tom Brady and the worst player in the league is a few years of step increases. And if a player makes it through his third season, he can never be cut from the roster until he chooses to retire, except in the most extreme cases of misconduct.

This would incentivize mediocrity, not excellence. It is also almost exactly how government-run K-12 schools are structured. Reform ideas that ignore those incentive problems are doomed to fail. Adding some competition to the existing near-monoply would do much to give teachers the same incentive to make the most of their talent that athletes currently enjoy.

Comments Off on What if NFL Players Were Paid Like Teachers?

Posted in education

Tagged , , , , ,

TSA Pats Down Breast Cancer Survivor with Double Mastectomy

Posted on October 3, 2011 | Comments Off on TSA Pats Down Breast Cancer Survivor with Double Mastectomy

Lori Dorn is a breast cancer survivor. Her hair still hasn’t grown back after enduring chemotherapy. She must look very suspicious, because here’s what she went through on a recent trip:

The TSA pulled her aside for a breast patdown, even though she stated she had breast implants in place after her bilateral mastectomy. Of course, that didn’t stop them. They didn’t even let her take out the Device Identification Card that would could have explained where the implants came from and their medical purpose.

Comments Off on TSA Pats Down Breast Cancer Survivor with Double Mastectomy

Posted in Uncategorized

Parts of PATRIOT Act Declared Unconstitutional

Posted on September 30, 2011 | Comments Off on Parts of PATRIOT Act Declared Unconstitutional

In yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, Jonathan Turley blasted President Obama’s record on civil liberties:

Historically, this country has tended to correct periods of heightened police powers with a pendulum swing back toward greater individual rights. Many were questioning the extreme measures taken by the Bush administration, especially after the disclosure of abuses and illegalities. Candidate Obama capitalized on this swing and portrayed himself as the champion of civil liberties.

However, President Obama not only retained the controversial Bush policies, he expanded on them. The earliest, and most startling, move came quickly.

Today brought better news. MSNBC reports that the U.S. Circuit Court struck down two PATRIOT Act provisions dealing with probable cause-less searches. The case centered around Brandon Mayfield, an attorney in Portland who was falsely linked to the 2004 Madrid bombings.

Mayfield was arrested and fingerprinted. His fingerprint was falsely matched to a print found in Madrid. After that, the FBI put him “under 24-hour surveillance, listened to his phone calls and surreptitiously searched his home and law office.” This , according to Judge Ann Aiken, crossed the line.

Two provisions down, many more to go. Until then, President Bush’s third term continues.

Comments Off on Parts of PATRIOT Act Declared Unconstitutional

Posted in Law, Security Theater

Tagged , , , , ,

Regulation Roundup

Posted on September 30, 2011 | Comments Off on Regulation Roundup

Here’s a fresh batch of regulatory bloopers:

  • In Michigan, it is legal to kill ducks during hunting season, but not to scare them.
  • In Pateros, Washington, it is illegal for dogs to be nuisances.
  • Massage parlors are illegal in well-named Horneytown, North Carolina.
  • In Salem, West Virginia, it is illegal to eat candy if you’re going to church in the next 90 minutes.
  • In Maine, it is illegal to walk on any street with untied shoelaces.
  • In New Britain, Connecticut, fire trucks on their way to a fire may not go faster than 25 mph.
  • In Brooklyn, New York, it is against the law for horses to sleep in bathtubs.
  • In South Dakota, it is illegal to fall asleep inside a cheese factory.

Comments Off on Regulation Roundup

Posted in regulation

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

Right on Cue

Posted on September 29, 2011 | Comments Off on Right on Cue

In this morning’s CEI Podcast, my colleague John Berlau predicted that the new price cap on debit card swipe fees would lead to the end of free debit cards and free checking. He pointed out that while this is an unintended consequence, it is also entirely foreseeable.

It didn’t take long for that prediction to come true. Bank of America just announced that it will start charging its debit card users $5 per month. They are not the only ones:

JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo are testing $3 fees for debit cards in select areas, and Citibank recently announced it is raising its fees for checking accounts. Janney Montgomery Scott analyst Thomas McCrohan said last week that Visa and MasterCard, the top two debit card companies, may increase drastically increase (sic) fees on small purchases to offset the losses.

Thanks, Congress.

Comments Off on Right on Cue

Posted in Economics, Price and Wage Controls

Tagged , , , , ,

Herbert Hoover, Father of the New Deal

Posted on September 29, 2011 | Comments Off on Herbert Hoover, Father of the New Deal

Whether you love the New Deal or loathe it, its policies were not entirely new. FDR’s predecessor, Herbert Hoover, set the precedent. History remembers him as a laissez faire president; a do-nothing who simply let the Great Depression happen. This requires an odd definition of “laissez faire” and an even stranger understanding of “do-nothing” to actually be true.

A new Cato paper from St. Lawrence University economics professor Steve Horwitz takes a closer look:

In fact, Hoover had long been a critic of laissez faire. As president, he doubled federal spending in real terms in four years. He also used government to prop up wages, restricted immigration, signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff, raised taxes, and created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation—all interventionist measures and not laissez faire. Unlike many Democrats today, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s advisers knew that Hoover had started the New Deal. One of them wrote, “When we all burst into Washington … we found every essential idea [of the New Deal] enacted in the 100-day Congress in the Hoover administration itself.”

Read the whole paper here.

Comments Off on Herbert Hoover, Father of the New Deal

Posted in Business Cycles, Economics, History

Tagged , , , , , , ,

CEI Podcast for September 29, 2011: The End of Free Debit Cards

Posted on September 29, 2011 | Comments Off on CEI Podcast for September 29, 2011: The End of Free Debit Cards

Have a listen here.

Every time you use your debit card, the merchant has to pay a fee to the company that issued your card, usually about 1 percent of the purchase price. On October 1, that price will be capped by law to 21 cents. John Berlau, Director of CEI’s Center for Investors and Entrepreneurs, explains the unintended consequences that will hurt consumers, merchants, and banks alike. John has written on interchange fees for The Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, The American Spectator, and other outlets.

Comments Off on CEI Podcast for September 29, 2011: The End of Free Debit Cards

Posted in CEI Podcast, Economics, Price and Wage Controls

Tagged , , , , , ,

DC’s Capital Bikeshare Program

Posted on September 27, 2011 | 7 comments

If you walk around DC, you’ll see bright red bike racks here and there, along with matching bicycles. They were installed about a year ago, and anyone can use them. It’s the city’s way of encouraging people to use bicycles instead of cars.

It hasn’t worked as planned. According to my colleague Marc Scribner, before the Bikeshare program, about 1.6 percent of person-trips in the city were on bikes. Now it’s 1.9 percent.

That 0.3 percent gain comes at a steep price:

The Capital Bikeshare bikes cost around $1,000 a piece and have a life cycle of six years. Annual operating costs are somewhere closer to $2,000 per bike. In the past two years, I have spent approximately $500 on my personal bike that I commute to work on daily — $250 a year. Capital Bikeshare’s costs given the benefits are simply absurd.

7 Comments

Posted in Economics, Spending

Time to Abolish DHS

Posted on September 27, 2011 | Comments Off on Time to Abolish DHS

Gene Healy makes a good case in his latest column:

In a new book, “Terror, Security, and Money,” professors John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart closely examine that question and, using a set of assumptions weighted in favor of the government, conclude that, to justify the increased post-Sept. 11 spending, we “would have to deter, prevent, foil, or protect against 1,667 otherwise successful [attempted Times Square car bomb-type] attacks per year, or more than four per day.”

Terrorism is rare. Much rarer than 4 attacks per day. We already have military and police forces to deal with that rare threat. DHS is redundant at best. It would be both good policy and good politics to shutter the department and hand its legitimate functions over to other agencies.

Comments Off on Time to Abolish DHS

Posted in Security Theater