Worries over illegal immigration are not unique to the United States. While Congress debated immigration reforms in the past two weeks, another boatload of Africans drowned while trying to reach Spain’s Canary Islands, and undocumented Bolivian workers died in a…
Category: Other
Dedicating sales tax is bad public policy
Conserving resources and providing habitat for wildlife is good. So are state parks and the arts. I’d happily pay more taxes for Minnesota to increase spending in these areas. But amending the state constitution to dedicate a fixed proportion of…
Immigration a fact of our democracy
Immigration issues often are presented as distinct either/or questions: Does immigration help or hurt the economy? Do immigrants take jobs away from native-born citizens? These are what logic professors call “false dichotomies.” On such complex issues, seemingly opposing views often…
Strike balance with eminent domain laws
The Minnesota Legislature, like those in many other states, wants to limit the power of local government to exercise eminent domain. This is good. Taking land from private citizens and transferring it to another private entity for “economic development” has…
It’s time for MAC to stop coddling Northwest
A line from Shakespeare’s “King Lear” comes to mind in Northwest Airlines’ latest legal gambit to stop making lease payments to the Metropolitan Airports Commission: “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.” Some folks…
Fed chiefs aren’t there to serve presidents
Obituary writers were kind to G. William Miller. Most noted he was the only person who ever served as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and as Treasury secretary, and that in this latter job he oversaw an unprecedented federally…
Pension controversies nothing new
The temptation to abuse pension funds is nothing new. In cartoonist Garry Trudeau’s collection titled “But the Pension Fund Was Just Sitting There!” con man Duke uses pension money to hire a football star. Jimmy Hoffa allegedly looted Teamsters union…
Don’t judge tax-refund loans too quickly
Making large extrapolations from small bases can be dangerous. Case in point: I recently bought steel at the rate of $1,700 a ton for one of my projects. A few days later, I bought more steel from a different vendor,…
Liquor-law reports sobering
A recent report by the Legislative Auditor’s Office makes clear that Minnesotans pay more for booze than necessary. It is not clear that this is bad for society as a whole, but it does raise the questions of who benefits…
Jury is out on telecom consolidation
We have come full circle in telecommunications. A half-century ago, a monolithic Bell system dominated U.S. telephone service. Antitrust rulings in the 1980s and new technology demolished that monopoly. After many years of apparently freewheeling competition in telephony — and…