powered by Surfing Waves Now they’re retreating to a cloud of smoke [to] congratulate themselves on being masters of the universe. – Rose DeWitt Bukater ( from Titanic , portrayed by Kate Winslet) Who knew how well the screenplay writers of the 1997 blockbuster film, Titanic , would describe the clown-show that annually occurs in Davos, Switzerland? Absent the “cloud of smoke,” Kate Winslet’s character aptly describes the mentality on display last week at the World Economic Forum (WEF) by numerous attendees w…
powered by Surfing Waves By Clarence ‘Bud’ Albright You don’t have to be Nostradamus to see the Biden Administration’s hostility to the traditional U.S. energy mix sets us up for long-term trouble. The president made it clear on his first day in office he would cede America’s hard-won gains in energy projects that led to new dominance in global energy production. With the stroke of a pen, he laid low the cause of American energy independence by canceling the permitting needed to build the Keystone XL pipeline. …
powered by Surfing Waves How can you get what you want? Years ago, Clarence Carson pointed out that fundamentally, there are four ways, and Paul Cleveland and I explored this in a 2010 article in The Freeman . They are worth revisiting: You can make something yourself, someone can give it to you as a gift, you can steal it, or you can trade for it. Doing it yourself is fun sometimes, but unless you’re doing it recreationally, DIY is the road to poverty and starvation. Adam Smith is correct : It is t…
powered by Surfing Waves California Governor Newsom is emphatically finger pointing, scapegoating, and complaining that oil companies are making outlandish profits, but he may be out of touch with the elephant in the room, the mirror on the wall. While the governor is doing everything he can to shut down oil production in one of America’s most oil-rich states , the governor is blindly pushing California energy policies ahead of our basic energy realities – leaving the state at the mercy of an unstable world fo…
powered by Surfing Waves In 2023, more than half of states will be raising their minimum wage. While this may sound like a recipe for disaster, recent reporting has demonstrated that it is not expected to have a significant impact on employment or wages. The reason is straightforward: wages for low-skilled jobs have risen in recent months amid strong labor demand, which has caused a labor shortage. Thus, the equilibrium wage for low-skilled jobs—precisely those jobs that would regularly be impacted by a minimum…
powered by Surfing Waves In 1964, Leonard Read wrote a powerful essay celebrating the free market in education. Read, who founded FEE nearly two decades prior to promote individual and economic freedom, recognized the ways in which government control of the K-12 education sector constrained choice and prevented diversity and abundance of learning options. In “The Case for the Free Market in Education,” Read asked us to imagine that education had been freed from government interference and was instead “restored…
powered by Surfing Waves In the fall, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law legislation giving medical boards in the state the power to punish — including via revoking state medical licenses — doctors for challenging the orthodoxy regarding coronavirus. This new law was quickly responded to with lawsuits challenging it. Judges considering two of those lawsuits, in two different federal district courts in California, have decided whether to grant temporary injunctions against enforcement of the law…
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