“Americans want government to protect their current jobs and tell them where their next job, and their children’s jobs, will come from. But government is not good at that.”—Gene Sperling, former economic advisor to Bill Clinton. Rich Karlgaard writes in Forbes Magazine that, for all the angst about the war in Iraq reflected in the […]

Two divergent quotes from a Labor Day report card for American workers, as reported by the Wall Street Journal:“There’s no doubt that relative to the growth rate of the economy over the last five years, the state of the American worker is in pretty sorry shape.”—Lawrence Katz, Harvard University and chief economist during the Clinton […]

We are clearly very near our third generation of economic illiteracy in this country, shamelessly exploited by over the top demagoguery on energy policy. I have never seen such duplicity combined with cowardice and pandering, topping even the late 1970’s in foolishness. The reasons this is so are legion and I won’t recap them here, […]

In a recent article, George Will says that “Michigan Has a Problem”, which is that its prosperity is withering as America’s automobile industry withers. When examined more closely, the state’s economy is really a microcosm of the larger problem embodied in the debate over protectionism vs. the opportunity society in coping with a globalized workplace. […]

One of my heroes, Peter Drucker, died last November, just in time to produce highlights of his work and ideas at the peak of the transformation from the old social contract to his “new realities”, as illustrated by the demise of the poster child of the old contract, General Motors. GM was the model of […]

Three recent policy debates in Congress and two recent research reports should give all of us very serious concern. I refer to the debates on the approval of the CAFTA treaty, the energy bill, and the transportation bill, all of which seemingly had desirable, or at least acceptable, outcomes from the Bush administration’s point of […]

I continue to be amazed at how CNN’s Lou Dobbs and a number of fellow-traveling politicians are consistently able to bash U. S. companies with impunity on a daily basis for their outsourcing strategies, while corporate leaders seem too cowed and intimidated to make any attempt to defend themselves. It has been called “the great […]

In my last issue, I commented briefly on the misguided comments of Treasury Secretary Snow in “talking down” the dollar and blaming China’s trade and currency policies for the loss of U. S. manufacturing jobs. Since then, we have witnessed the domestic political payoff in the form of new U. S. quotas on Chinese textiles. […]

Each Labor Day brings the usual editorials on the concerns of organized labor and the threats of globalization of world markets, and this one was no exception. David Broder currently laments the “wasting of the manufacturing sector”, and suggests it is a problem far too important to be ignored by the political class in pursuit […]

Lately I have been reminded from several directions of the efficacy in various applications of the concept of “public choice theory” as developed by economics Nobel Laureate James M. Buchanan. In a recent issue of “Imprimis”, Buchanan expounds on this theory, which to me is nothing more complicated than one that espouses a market-based system […]