All Posts Tagged With: "California"

Price Caps on Electricity Are a Good Idea?

Editor’s note: On July 4, shortly after this article was written, the San Francisco Chronicle ran this front-page headline: “Federal Price Limits Backfire.” Will price controls solve the California electricity crisis? Did price controls solve the oil crisis of the 1970s? Did price controls make apartments easily available in New York City? Of course not. [...]

1Oct2001 | | 0 comments | Continued

Did Deregulation Kill California?

Jerry Taylor is director of natural resource studies at the Cato Institute. Skyrocketing wholesale power prices in California and the daily threat of brownouts and blackouts have cast a pall over deregulation. “Liberals,” led by California Governor Gray Davis, blame a restructuring law passed in 1996 for the crisis, arguing that it left the state [...]

1Jun2001 | | 0 comments | Continued

The California Power Mess

Years ago, California state senator Bill Richardson (not the former energy secretary) wrote an instructive little book about politicians with a charming title: What Makes You Think We Read the Bills? The electricity debacle in the Golden State makes me think there’s a need for an updated version. The title could be What Makes You Think We Read Anything at All?

1Apr2001 | | 0 comments | Continued

Shameless in California

A year ago October the California legislature and Governor Gray Davis enacted SB645, which empowers unions with monopoly bargaining privileges at California State University and the University of California to extract monthly fees from the paychecks of faculty and staff who want to remain union-free. Every Democrat and two Republicans in the legislature voted in [...]

1Nov2000 | | 1 comment | Continued

Paycheck Protection in California: What Went Wrong?

Proposition 226, which was on the primary ballot in California last June, would have required unions to get annual written permission from workers before spending their dues and agency fees on politics. The proposition lost 53 to 47 percent. In January, just after the initiative qualified for the ballot, polls indicated that over 70 percent [...]

1Nov1998 | | 0 comments | Continued

Leonard E. Read: A Portrait

The Reverend Mr. Opitz, a contributing editor of The Freeman, was a senior staff member of the Foundation for Economic Education until his retirement in 1992. He was book review editor of The Freeman for many years. Leonard started out as a farm boy in the small town of Hubbardston, Michigan. There are always chores [...]

1Sep1998 | | 4 comments | Continued

Nightmare in Green

Jarret Wollstein is a founder and director of the International Society for Individual Liberty, a global libertarian organization with members in over 70 countries. He is also the author of eight books, including Lethal Compassion: Why Government Medicine Is the Cure that Kills (with Mary Ruwart). “The threat of an environmental crisis will be the [...]

1Sep1998 | | 3 comments | Continued

The Wild West Meets Cyberspace

In 1848 Americans received the startling news that the vast territory they had just acquired from Mexico included tremendous riches. California, previously a distant, sleepy Mexican province whose economy was based on trading cattle hides and tallow for manufactured goods, was actually brimming with gold. There it was, just lying on the ground. Tens of [...]

1Jul1998 | | 2 comments | Continued

Superstar Athletes Provide Economics Lessons

Mr. Billingsley is a journalism fellow at the Los Angeles-based Center for the Study of Popular Culture. What do former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana, L.A. Raiders running back Bo Jackson, and San Diego Chargers quarterback Dan Fouts have in common? All three are former National Football League stars and all three are multimillionaires—not [...]

1Jan1997 | | 0 comments | Continued

For Appearance’s Sake

Don’t let people control the appearance of their property. That’s the view of Montgomery County (Texas) Judge Alan “Barb” Sadler. During the spring of 1995, he proposed a law to restrict commercial signs on strips of privately owned land along rural highways in his county. Mr. Sadler decried the “general decay of the area, and [...]

1Nov1996 | | 0 comments | Continued

The Crusade for Politically Correct Consumption

Dr. DiLorenzo is Professor of Economics at Loyola College in Maryland. Neo-puritanism seems to be running amok in the United States. The federal excise tax on alcohol was doubled in 1991; many states have sharply increased tax rates on tobacco products and have enacted myriad smoking bans; the Washington Post reports a growing movement to [...]

1Sep1995 | | 1 comment | Continued

Freedom: An Endangered Species

Mr. Greenslade lives in Walnut Creek, California. The recent complaint filed against Taiwanese immigrant Taung Ming-Lin and his corporation Wang Lin, Inc., for alleged violations of the federal Endangered Species Act is another example of the federal government usurping its powers. Ming-Lin’s company is charged, in a complaint filed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife [...]

1Sep1995 | | 0 comments | Continued

Special Interests and the Internment of Japanese-Americans During World War II

Professor Caudill teaches economics at Auburn University and Ms. Hill is an undergraduate student. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, approving the en masse relocation of Japanese and Japanese-American citizens from the West Coast into the interior of the country. The order was signed amid the hysteria following the Japanese [...]

1Jul1995 | | 0 comments | Continued
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