Showing posts with label commerce. Show all posts
Showing posts with label commerce. Show all posts

Walter E Williams: Trade Deficit Angst

Donald Trump's primary bluster.   Let's look at the political angst over trade deficits. A trade deficit is when people in one country buy more from another country than the other country's people buy from them. There cannot be a trade deficit in a true economic sense. Let's examine this. I buy more from my grocer than he buys from me. That   ... MORE

Walter E Williams: Unappreciated Tax On The Poor

High risk neighborhoods are taxing themselves.  A few years ago, BET had a commentary titled "Where Are the Grocery Stores in Black Neighborhoods?" One wonders whether anyone thinks that the absence of supermarkets in predominantly black neighborhoods means that white merchants do not like dollars coming out of black hands.      ... MORE

Nick Gillespie: Why Intellectuals Hate Capitalism

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey explains.   "Intellectuals have always disdained commerce," says Whole Foods Market co-founder John Mackey. They "have always sided with the aristocrats to maintain a society where the businesspeople were kept down." Having helped create the global grocery chain intellectuals arguably like best,       ... MORE

Katherine Mangu-Ward: Plastic Bags Are Good

Another thing prohibitionists get wrong.  Here is a list of things that are thicker than a typical plastic grocery bag: A strand of hair. A coat of paint. A human cornea. High-density polyethylene is a miracle of materials science. Despite weighing less than 5 grams, one bag can hold 17 pounds, well over 1,000 times its own weight. At about a penny ... MORE

Nitwittery Run Amok: New York Cracks Down On Toy Guns

by Elizabeth Harrington.  Expect fake murders to go down. New York is forcing Walmart, Amazon, and other retailers to pay over $300,000 for the crime of selling toy guns. The settlement stems from an investigation by the state’s attorney general office, which sent cease and desist letters to the retailers in December for breaking its strict law against   ... MORE

The Case For Allowing U.S. Crude Oil Exports

by Blake Clayton.     Federal lawmakers should overturn the ban on exporting crude oil produced in the United States. As recently as half a decade ago, oil companies had no interest in exporting U.S. crude oil, but that has changed. Oil production has grown more in the United States over the past five years than anywhere else in the world, even as     ... MORE

Why Buying Drugs Online Is Safer Than On The Street

by Christopher Ingraham.      If only reason were a consideration. "There's no way Silk Road could be reasonably expected to reduce violence," Federal District Court Judge Katherine Forrest said at the recent sentencing hearing for Ross Ulbricht, the convicted founder of the Silk Road online drug market. Going into sentencing, Ulbricht's       ... MORE

Andrew Napolitano: Shooting Themselves In The Foot

Next time, consult the Constitution.    The turmoil over the efforts by the State of Indiana to make lawful the decisions by operators of public accommodations to decline their services based on their stated religious views has died down because the legislature amended the offending parts of its legislation so that the new law prohibits denying services  ... MORE

Pot Is Making Colorado So Much Money The State May Have To Give Some Of Its $50 Million Windfall To Taxpayers

by David McCormack.   Colorado has generated so much money from recreational pot taxes that the state is bound by law to pass some of the tax money directly on to residents. Voters legalized marijuana in 2012 on the understanding that revenue raised would go to schools, but a 1992 voter-approved constitutional amendment means some of the   ... MORE

Measure To Tax Internet Sales Is Dead For A Year

by Sean Higgins.    Legislation to tax Internet sales is dead for the year, a key Senate aide said. No bill allowing the taxation will be taken up before Congress' lame-duck session ends, meaning that purchases made through online merchants such as Amazon will continue to be tax-free for the foreseeable future. A coalition made up of state and      ... MORE

Walter E Williams: Embarrassing Economists

The first fundamental law of demand.      So as to give some perspective, I'm going to ask readers for their guesses about human behavior before explaining my embarrassment by some of my fellow economists. Suppose the prices of ladies jewelry rose by 100 percent. What would you predict would happen to sales? What about a    ... MORE

Veronique de Rugy: Department Of Cronyism

The administration's favor-dispensing machine.     What's the point of the Department of Commerce? If not for the Census and the Patent Office, the department would function as little more than a one-stop shop for special interests. Don't believe me? Look at its record. In Fiscal Year 2013, the Department of Commerce spent about     ... MORE

Sonny Bunch: Stifling Commerce

Government smothers what it's supposed to promote.     "I ran for office pledging to make our government leaner and smarter and more consumer friendly," President Barack Obama reminded a group of small businessmen at a January 2012 White House gathering. You can see why the audience needed a refresher course. The president's     ... MORE

Greg Beato: The Benefits Of Unregulated Pot

The domesticating influence of capitalism.     Last September the Washington State Liquor Control Board published a 43-page list of proposed guidelines for the sale of recreational marijuana. A few days later, Colorado issued an even longer set of rules, 136 densely packed pages in all. In the realm of legal, commercialized cannabis,      ... MORE