Think Tank West

I picked up my local beer magazine, On Tap, and was surprised to see a front page story on Matthew Lesko, the government subsidies guy who famously wears a question mark jacket. The question marks indicate that all you folks out there can get on board the federal gravy train, and Lesko can show you how. As president-elect Barack Obama [...]

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I am a frequent lurker and occasional poster on a chat board for my favorite college hoops team. On that board, some of the chatters refer to games between two of our rivals, or teams we just don’t like, as “meteor games” — contests where instead of having to choose between two evils, we root [...]

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FBI agent Sam Hicks was killed this week when he and other police officers tried to serve a warrant at 6 am on the husband of Christina Korbe. Korbe says she thought criminal intruders were trying to break into her house. She called 911 and retrieved her handgun. Hicks was shot shortly after he entered the house.  This will provide an [...]

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Alan Greenspan, once regarded as a Maestro, and so admired that people actually believed a New Republic article by Stephen Glass and Jonathan Chait claiming that a Wall Street financial firm had a literal shrine to him, is now being blamed for the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Is that fair? Did Greenspan’s Fed [...]

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It seems you can sue a school — and win — if you are a custodian who falls off a stepladder on the job (due, apparently, to having received insufficient training in the use of stepladders). You can apparently file a suit because your daughter didn’t make the cheerleading squad.  But a federal appeals court has just ruled that you [...]

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University of Missouri-Kansas City political scientist Max Skidmore recently criticized as “add[ing] nothing” Cal-Berkeley economist Konstantin Magin’s arguments in support of Social Security personal accounts. Let’s examine some of Skidmore’s arguments in favor of the current system: Magin seems almost to promise guaranteed, risk free returns. Even if this were correct, it is irrelevant. Social Security is not an investment scheme; [...]

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Russell Roberts, of NPR, Cafe Hayek, and EconTalk fame, will talk about his new book The Price of Everything: A Parable of Possibility and Prosperity at a Cato Book Forum at noon on Monday, December 1. Earlier this fall, George Will wrote of Roberts’ book in Newsweek:  Improbable as it might seem, perhaps the most important [...]

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A year ago it looked like we might replace the son of a president in the White House with the wife of a president, while some Republicans grumbled that it was too bad the president’s brother couldn’t succeed him. I wrote then that Americans fought a rebellion to replace a monarchy with a republic, “in [...]

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Or am I reading too much into the Washington Post editorial, “Step Aside, Mr. Rangel,” when it says: At a time when President-elect Barack Obama is holding frequent news conferences to reassure the markets and the American people that he is ready to lead the nation to economic recovery, the last thing he will need [...]

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Barack Obama’s apparent decision to retain Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense is popular in the Beltway. One thing pundits admire is Gates’ talk about sacrificing expensive weapons systems designed for peer competitors to pay for the counterinsurgency campaigns that we are fighting. What Gates’ fans don’t point out is he has done little more [...]

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