There is a false choice between having spills or not having spills. The true choice is between market mechanisms for determining the amount to invest in anti-spill technology and government mechanisms for making the determination. We have not tried the market mechanism, and I have no basis for claiming that it would work better or worse than the government mechanism.

Therefore, we need to cut pay for state and local workers.
Even if you think that we need more government spending, the spending could be on something other than keeping salaries and benefits high for government employees.

We are making and enforcing far too many criminal laws that create traps for the innocent but unwary, and threaten to turn otherwise respectable, law-abiding citizens into criminals. Consider a few examples from the new book “One Nation Under Arrest”:
• A 12-year old girl arrested and handcuffed for eating one French fry on the Washington subway system.
•  A cancer-ridden grandmother arrested and criminally charged for refusing to trim her hedges the way officials in Palo Alto, Calif., were trying to force her to.
• A former high-school science whiz kid sent to prison after initially being arrested by FBI agents clad in SWAT gear for failing to affix a federally mandated sticker to his otherwise legal UPS package.
• A 67-year-old grandfather imprisoned because some of the paperwork for his home-based orchid business did not satisfy an international treaty.
I could go on, but all these stories share one thing in common — they are about typical Americans.

Non-economists often get upset when they learn that someone has gotten rich by solving a problem. Economists, by contrast, worry when they think no one can get rich by solving a problem.

We are left in a difficult place. Neither the private nor the public sector seems up to handling these kinds of problems.

The US House of Representatives has just passed the American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act. The tax provisions of this bill will hurt American workers, reduce American exports, and make American companies less competitive in the international marketplace. Since the US Senate has already passed companion legislation, these ill-considered bills could soon be reconciled in conference and become the law of the land. If so, American firms and workers will pay a substantial price.

The purpose of the financial reform bill purportedly is to prevent another financial crisis from happening. Price controls on debit cards, much less prepaid cards such as gift cards, have nothing to do with that goal. But they have much to do with a powerful special-interest group seizing the anti-bank mood in the country to ram through new mandates that will allow them to impose their business costs on consumers. Maybe next they’ll try to persuade Congress to outlaw free parking and friendly cashiers in order to reduce business costs.