Economic policies on taxes or health care seldom are redesigned from scratch. Instead, change comes as serial modifications to existing systems. This is an understandable outcome of our political process, but it makes us poorer than if we occasionally stepped…
Category: Other
Benefits drive buses
The primary issue in the transit strike is what constitutes an acceptable level of compensation for Metro Transit employees. Controversy generated by the strike, however, exposes a second fundamental issue. What costs and benefits are there to society from public…
Be it resolved: Pfizer move only symbolic
My first reaction to Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s plans to use the state’s pension board to retaliate against a drug company was that this is the most cynical act in the history of Minnesota politics. Further reading demonstrated that my initial…
Getting a lock on Social Security
It is hard to find any topic that causes greater confusion than Social Security “trust funds.” Not only are these funds widely misunderstood, but many people also apparently think that they have been deliberately misused since big balances began to…
Everyday risks are hard to pin down
A recent tragedy highlights a knotty microeconomic problem. A 14-year-old boy on a farm errand died in a highway accident. The question is, to what extent laws should govern risky actions parents allow — or direct — children to take.…
Greenspan avoided this road before
Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan does well to address, at the end of his career, problems that he did not have the guts to take on 21 years ago when he still was campaigning for a major federal appointment. While…
Drive the drug firms away to lower prices
Drug costs clearly will be an issue in 2004 election campaigns. Voters see high drug costs as a national problem. Candidates are responding. Many are quick to paint pharmaceutical companies as greedy villains, but most are unwilling to risk much…
Mercury policy is a heavy topic
The controversy about federal mercury standards embodies all of the features of most environmental disputes and demonstrates practical difficulties in implementing effective measures to protect health and the environment. Mercury is a heavy metal that can be harmful to humans.…
Beware curse of winners in politics
John Kerry seems well on his way to the Democratic nomination. It is time for him to start thinking about how to avoid the winner’s curse. Two petroleum engineers coined that term decades ago when they studied petroleum leases auctions…
Liability in limbo wastes resources
Where is Ronald Coase when the Minnesota Legislature needs his advice on rotting houses? Coase, a professor at the University of Chicago, won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1991. He doesn’t know diddly about water infiltration, but his ideas…