This past August, Radley Balko exposed the frequent misuse by police of drug-sniffing dogs. (HT to Warren Smith for alerting me to Radley’s fine article.)
Dwight Lee tweaks Bruce Yandle’s bootleggers-and-Baptists thesis. A slice:
Similarly, President Obama was critical of Wall Street financial firms, already publicly unpopular for their large size, high profits and salaries, and opposition to provisions in the Dodd-Frank banking regulation moving through Congress. Baptists who favored increased banking regulation to protect consumers reinforced Obama’s criticisms. But, like the pharmaceutical industry, Wall Street firms avoided vitriolic responses to the Obama administration, while working with it to protect their financial interests. Although voters were aware of, and most of them were pleased by, the political attacks on Wall Street, they were less aware of the backroom deals that the Obama administration was cutting with those firms. Today, the Wall Street firms remain highly profitable and continue to pay high salaries, and large banks are getting larger by taking over smaller community banks less able to compete because the compliance costs created by Dodd-Frank regulations impose greater burdens on small banks than on large ones.
Randy Holcombe uncovers a major flaw in Warren Buffet’s reasoning. Here’s the opening of Randy’s essay:
Here’s an article about Warren Buffet’s well-known view that the rich should pay more in taxes. His bottom-line argument is, “If you’re in the luckiest 1% of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99%.” I don’t disagree.
My disagreement with Buffet is the implication that being forced to pay more in taxes has any relationship whatsoever with thinking about the rest of humanity. People are not thinking about the rest of humanity when they are being forced to do something. There is no virtue in paying taxes.
Here’s a short intellectual autobiography of my colleague Chris Coyne.
Kevin Williamson reflects on Pres. Obama’s economic record. A slice:
What can we actually say about Obama administration policies? One is that the so-called stimulus underperformed on one front and failed on another. It may have provided some meaningful stimulus (economists debate the question still) at a cost — there always is a cost — that will remain unknown for the foreseeable future. What it did not do — we have the president’s own word on this — is dramatically improve public infrastructure. Indeed, every time the Democrats call for a dramatic new campaign of infrastructure investment, it is an implicit indictment of the failure of previous campaigns. The stimulus mainly operated as a covert bailout for badly governed Democratic cities and states.
Ilya Somin reminds us of his plea to rename May 1st “Victims of Communism Day.”
And here are Emily Skarbek’s reflections from London on May 1st “celebrations.“
