Where would meals be better and cheaper? A city where customers could choose between restaurants competing in a free market? Or a city where everyone was forced to buy all their meals at a few mafia-controlled restaurants?
Like the mafia, Congress wants to make you an offer you can’t refuse. At least the mafia doesn’t pretend that it’s acting for your own good.
Hey, it’s the Chicago Way.
A reusable suborbital rocket company based in New Zealand. Call it Kiwispace.
[Monday morning update]
Clark Lindsey has more. Apparently I misinterpreted the project in my quick read. Payloads are recovered, but the vehicles don’t seem to be reused. I also have to say that someone who legally changes his last name for this kind of thing is a lot more fanatical about it than I am.
I have some more advice for Barack Obama that, like Joel Kotkin’s, he will be constitutionally unable to take, over at PJM today.
More proof that government spending doesn’t do much for job creation.
One reason unemployment continues to rise may be that stimulus funds did not target high-unemployment states.
You don’t say.
…it would look like this.
I think that this is one of those rare cases where an abortion is the only reasonable option.
…and 10.2% unemployment:
Naturally, according to the “experts” it’s more than expected.
It’s not more than I expected. I’m actually surprised it’s not worse, considering how they’ve been making war on business and vandalizing the economy in general.
Clark Lindsey has a first-hand report:
Mr. Bolden, a couple of House members and a representative of the administration all said very good things about not just the NGLLC but about prizes in general and their ability to leverage lots of innovation and productivity at low cost. Got the impression that there will be more money coming for Centennial Challenges and other prize programs.
Dave Masten and Phil Eaton gave brief but eloquent remarks.
Two former NSS executive directors were there: Lori Garver, now Deputy NASA Administrator, and George Whitesides, now NASA’s Chief of Staff. With entrepreneurial firms getting big checks via an innovative program like Centennial Challenges, which was inspired by the X PRIZE, and with space advocates in NASA management, I get the feeling that the NewSpace current is starting to flow into the mainstream.
Whatever comes of the Constellation mess, this at least is encouraging.
[Mid-afternoon update]
Chuck Divine also attended, and has more details.
Fight back against the thieves in Sacramento. Refile your state W-4 ASAP.
The rise of free-market populism in this country finally has manifested in an election. And judging from the hyperbolic reactions, you know it’s a political movement with staying power.
When tepid, traditional conservative candidate Doug Hoffman knocked off liberal Republican Dede Scozzafava—a candidate who was supported by nearly every boogeyman in the GOP handbook—you might have thought that the rabble had stormed the Bastille.
Sophisticated New York Times columnist Frank Rich called the event “a riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war” and compared the conservative surge to a murderous Stalinist purge. (Remarkably, the esteemed wordsmith failed to unleash similar histrionic language when one-time-Democrat Sen. Joe Lieberman met the same fate.)
Purging moderates is indeed a self-destructive strategy for any national party. But running a party without any litmus tests on the central issue of the economy seems to be similarly self-defeating.
The most impressive trick played by Rich and other liberals, though, is creating a narrative wherein the ones attempting to fundamentally reconfigure the American economy are cast as the moderates.
The nearly powerless who stand in their way? Well, they play the part of Stalinists.
But of course, as Orwell pointed out, the real Stalinists are the people who torture the language like Frank Rich does.