There is one group of workers who have signed a consent decree with the federal government, agreeing to never form a union. Do you know who they are? Answer below the fold. The economics of unions is quite simple. Like medieval guilds, the goal of a modern union is to monopolize the supply of labor […]

From USA Today (January 16, 2011) Most people intuitively know that the worst thing government can do in the middle of the deepest recession in 70 years is enact policies that increase the expected cost of labor. Yet that is exactly what happened last spring, with the passage of the health care reform bill, says […]

We’re celebrating a happy birthday with dear friends. Not every culture celebrates these mile markers of life’s journey, but Americans have traditionally done so. This, I suspect, is related to optimistic expectations about our future. Some birthdays demarcate an important change in life status. The twelfth birthday is associated with Christian confirmation and the thirteenth […]

From The Wall Street Journal (January 4, 2011) The least surprising event of 2010 was that, in the wake of new federal limits on how credit-card issuers can price risk and adjust interest rates, more Americans had to go to payday lenders, pawn shops and local loan sharks in order to get credit. It’s simply […]