A plague on both their houses. Imposing taxes on two business-to-business services, warehousing and repair and maintenance of business equipment, passed by a DFL majority in the last legislative session, is bad public policy. But some critics of the taxes…
Airline consolidation hurts consumers, bad for markets
It is good that Minnesota is among the 19 states plus the District of Columbia that are asserting their voices about the proposed merger of American Airlines and US Airways. This deal, just the latest in an ongoing series of…
Mandates often fail market’s smell test
Two current issues illustrate the pitfalls of traditional command-and-control approaches to environmental policies. The first is that of power plants that burn trash to generate electricity and that were constructed as the result of a state law passed a third…
Don’t look to markets for rational behaviors
The financial markets’ extreme reactions last week to sundry pronouncements by the Federal Reserve’s policy-making Open-Market Committee, and its individual members, call into question some of the assumptions of contemporary economic theory. If people really are highly rational in their…