A version of this article appeared February 21, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Perverse Incentives of the Lawyers Guild. While law school enrollment drops, ABA rules bust the budgets. Law schools are in trouble. Applications are down almost 50% to an estimated 54,000 this […]
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Senators know that even unpaid entry-level work can be valuable. That’s why they make some of their employees work for nothing. President Obama called in his State of the Union for an increase in the minimum wage to $9 an hour by 2015, from $7.25, notwithstanding the evidence that it will increase unemployment among young, […]
Read MoreIntroduced here by Dr. John Baden A Tale of Two Cities, Boulder and Bozeman First, an admission: I like Boulder, Colorado–as a place to visit and from which to learn. I’ve been there several times and always enjoyed my visits. Many say Bozeman is like Boulder was 30 plus years ago. They mean that as […]
Read MoreIntroduced by Dr. John A. Baden, PhD Here is one great truth that has stuck with me since I was an undergraduate. There is little disagreement among micro economists; their basic model is largely uncontested. This field studies the behavior of individual households and firms in making decisions on the allocation of limited resources. It examines markets and […]
Read MoreThe End of Unions? by Richard A. Epstein (Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow and member of the Property Rights, Freedom, and Prosperity Task Force) Defining Ideas: A Hoover Institution Journal What Michigan Governor Rick Snyder gets right and wrong about labor policy. The age of big government is now upon us. The question is how to […]
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Despite gains in employment and a drop in the jobless rate in November, the labor force data released Friday were disturbing. They showed a drop of 350,000 in the number of people in the labor force, a big decline for one month and an extension of a troubling trend. Here is the bigger picture: the […]
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This article appeared in New York Post on December 3, 2012. Washington is consumed with wrangling over how to deal with the specter of big automatic tax hikes that will hit Jan. 1 when the Bush tax cuts expire. It’s also the day that the sequester kicks in, which is the budget-wonk term for an automatic process […]
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Introduction by John Baden: Ramona and I often are out of town on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, Election Day. Since we are likely to be gone, we are registered to receive “absentee ballots.” How easy they are; mark, sign, stuff into envelopes, put on a stamp, and we’ve done a small portion of […]
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There are moments when our political system, whose essential job is to mediate conflicts in broadly acceptable and desirable ways, is simply not up to the task. It fails. This may be one of those moments. What we learned in 2011 is that the frustrating and confusing budget debate may never reach a workable conclusion. […]
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I’d like to help reduce the frustration of folks who care about national politics and public policy. It’s my observation that a simple truth drives the major political parties. Here it is. When a national government goes beyond its most fundamental functions, e.g., enforcing the rule of law and providing national defense, it becomes a […]
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