Archive for John Semmens

Freedom Is the Environment’s Best Friend

John Semmens is a transportation policy analyst at the Laissez Faire Institute in Arizona. Every April 22 celebrations of Earth Day take place around the world. This can serve as a reminder to reflect on the status of our planet. Some believe the earth is in great peril and that stringent measures to restrain economic [...]

1Apr2007 | John Semmens | 1 comment | Continued

Privatize the DMV

John Semmens (jsemmens@cox.net) is a transportation policy analyst at the Laissez Faire Institute in Arizona. For most Americans, driving is the most dangerous activity they undertake on a regular basis. We ought to try to make the roads as safe as is humanly possible. Unfortunately, government ownership of the roads and the vehicle-registration/driver-licensing process undermine [...]

1Sep2006 | John Semmens | 4 comments | Continued

Wal-Mart Wasn’t Always the Biggest

John Semmens (jsemmens@cox.net) is a transportation policy analyst at the Laissez Faire Institute in Arizona. Editor’s note: As we went to press, and as if to illustrate the point of the following article, Fortune released its 2006 list of largest corporations, showing Exxon Mobil, not Wal-Mart, on top. For all the gnashing of teeth over [...]

1Aug2006 | John Semmens | 2 comments | Continued

How Public Transit Undermines Safety

Everyone knows that automobile travel is dangerous. This naturally leads to the assumption that public transit ought to be encouraged as a means of improving travel safety. However, the issue is more complex than this simple assumption allows. In some respects, introducing more transit vehicles into the mix of urban transportation options will increase the [...]

1Apr2006 | John Semmens | 0 comments | Continued

Wal-Mart Is Good for the Economy

Ideologues who rant against Wal-Mart do not understand economics. In a market economy, success goes to those businesses that best and most efficiently serve consumer needs.

1Oct2005 | John Semmens | 1 comment | Continued

Does Light Rail Worsen Congestion and Air Quality?

Growth in traffic has outpaced growth in population ever since the automobile went into mass production. This puts great demands on our transportation infrastructure. Trying to keep up with growing traffic by building more roadway capacity is a daunting task, particularly in urban regions. There are limits to how many lanes of roadway can be [...]

1Jun2005 | John Semmens | 3 comments | Continued

Alternate Route: Toward Efficient Urban Transportation by Clifford Winston and Chad Shirley

Brookings Institution • 1998 • 120 pages • $36.95 cloth; $15.95 paperback Urban transportation in America suffers from gross inefficiencies. The source of these inefficiencies is political intervention that pushes transportation policy away from cost-effective solutions and toward the distribution of benefits to favored groups—predominately transit managers and suppliers of transit inputs (that is, labor [...]

1Mar2000 | John Semmens | 1 comment | Continued

Driving Forces: The Automobile, Its Enemies, and the Politics of Mobility

Over the last two generations a battle between the automobile and its enemies has raged in most urban regions. Aligned against the automobile is an elite composed of self-appointed visionaries who believe they have the answer to how urbanized man should live. On the other side we have the masses of common people and the [...]

1Nov1999 | John Semmens | 0 comments | Continued

Driving America: Your Car, Your Government, Your Choice

John Semmens is an economist with the Laissez-Faire Institute in Chandler, Arizona. Driving America is a well-reasoned brief on behalf of the automobile. The car is the travel option of choice because it offers a fast, comfortable, convenient, and affordable way of getting where one wants to go. Nevertheless, there are those who would sacrifice [...]

1Nov1998 | John Semmens | 0 comments | Continued

Roads in a Market Economy

Mr. Semmens is an economist with the Laissez-Faire Institute in Chandler, Arizona. No one has labored longer than Gabriel Roth has in the pursuit of a more efficient transportation system. For over 40 years he has been analyzing problems and suggesting solutions. Most of this work has been in the form of shorter policy studies, [...]

1Aug1996 | John Semmens | 1 comment | Continued

Losing Freedom Costs a Lot

Mr. Semmens is an economist with Laissez-Faire Institute in Chandler, Arizona. Over the last fifty years, the federal government in the United States has taken on behemoth proportions. Six new cabinet departments have been created (Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, and Veterans Affairs). Twenty new “independent establishments and government [...]

1May1996 | John Semmens | 0 comments | Continued

Prosperity Without Pollution

Mr. Semmens is an economist with Laissez-Faire Institute in Chandler, Arizona. I recently had the opportunity to participate in a World Future Society “debate” on whether we could reduce pollution without also reducing our economic well-being. Mainstream thinking asserts that we must sacrifice at least some of our prosperity in order to protect the environment. [...]

1Mar1996 | John Semmens | 2 comments | Continued

Risk

Who should decide how much risk you should take? Proponents of government safety regulation think that the government has the expertise to decide this issue for you. Professor John Adams of University College London presents a case for more individual autonomy. While the government may have the manpower and the budget to commission numerous studies, [...]

1Feb1996 | John Semmens | 0 comments | Continued

The Environmental Assault on Mobility

Mr. Semmens is an economist with Laissez-Faire Institute in Chandler, Arizona. I recently had the opportunity to attend a Federal Highway Administration workshop on air-quality analysis. This session was designed to train government bureaucrats to operate computer models for assessing a region’s compliance with federal air pollution regulations. The experience was most enlightening. Air-quality planning [...]

1Aug1995 | John Semmens | 0 comments | Continued

Government Investment

John Semmens is an economist with the Laissez Faire Institute in Chandler, Arizona. The idea that the government should spend money as a means of stimulating the economy and boosting employment has been a formal part of U.S. policy since the Employment Act of 1946. This law was clearly rooted in Keynesian economics. The idea [...]

1Apr1994 | John Semmens | 0 comments | Continued

Federal Transit Subsidies: How Government Investment Harms the U.S. Economy

Mr. Semmens, a specialist in transportation issues, is an economist with the Laissez Faire Institute in Arizona. It has been asserted by some that part of .what is needed to revitalize the U.S. economy is more government investment. There is, of course, a superficial plausibility to this assertion. Every dollar the government spends becomes somebody’s [...]

1Feb1994 | John Semmens | 0 comments | Continued

Book Review: The Heated Debate: Greenhouse Predictions vs. Climate Reality by Robert C. Bailing

Pacific Research Institute, 177 Post St., San Francisco, CA 94108 • 1992 • 250 pages • $21.95 cloth, $14.95 paper Industrialization has allegedly led to increased levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) from combustion of fossil fuels. Higher amounts of CO2 have purportedly raised global temperatures. Warmer weather could generate significant changes in our climate. The [...]

1Sep1993 | John Semmens | 0 comments | Continued
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