The excitement in Wisconsin just won’t end. You might think a compromise will happen, but I very much doubt it. The Internet has changed everything.

Fed chairman Ben Bernanke likes to bitch about Congressional interference in Fed monetary policy yet Bernanke repeatedly tells Congress what to do regarding fiscal policy.

One has to study for years and get a Ph.D. to learn not to recognize the nose on one’s face.

The free market, not a bunch of bureaucrats, should set interest rates. None of the central bankers saw this crisis coming, so how the hell do they think they know what interest rates should be? I don’t know where they should be and they sure don’t know either. At least one of us is smart enough to admit it.

Lots of technologies get an initial boost from novelty and uncertainty about where the market is going (think 8-tracks, Betamax, or the laser disc), only to be abandoned once the drawbacks, or the preferences of your neighbors, become clear. Ultimately, I think making electric cars really common is going to imply a fair amount of infrastructure, like the ability to charge at work, or maybe swap batteries at a gas station. And I presume that EV production has considerable economies of scale, meaning that fewer cars produced translates to a higher price. That means that the cars have network effects–it doesn’t just matter what you want to buy, but what your neighbors want to buy.

But the numbers on median income are distorted by demographic change. When divorce rates rise, women who were not in the labor force suddenly find themselves looking for work. The number of workers and the number of households rises faster than the population. And the median slides down as a statistical artifact–there are many new households created where the head of a household, typically a woman, earns less than the median. So changes in median income over time do not capture progress for any one person

A Government Accountability Office report on duplicative federal programs is prima facie evidence that the government is a bloated mess. For example, there are 82 federal programs involved in teacher quality, 80 programs involved in economic development, and over 100 programs involved in surface transportation.

Yesterday evening Wisconsin State Senator Glenn Grothman was accosted by a mob of union members and supporters outside the state Capitol in Madison. Grothman was trying to enter the Capitol, but was hounded by the mob. About 2 ½ minutes into the video, you can see the mob start to break and run as it chases Grothman. Grothman escapes to an entry to the Capitol, but the door is locked, so he is cornered by the Democrat mob. The potential for violence is obvious in the video, but fortunately, Grothman is rescued by a Democratic legislator, Brett Hulsey, who tries to calm the crowd and persuade them not to use violence against Senator Grothman or other Republicans. He doesn’t have an easy time of it:

I have very little faith that the private sector will always avoid taking unreasonable risks. However, I have even less faith that regulators will have the wisdom to see the risks that private agents are missing. Remember that up until very late in the game, the criticism that Congress and regulators were directing at lenders was for turning down too many borrowers. What the government was pushing for was more lending to the “under-served” segments of the market. Yes, there can be market misbehavior. But regulators may well, as in this case, amplify the problems rather than dampen them.

When Medicaid was created in 1965 to provide health insurance to low income Americans, 1 in 50 Americans received Medicaid, now 1 in 6 Americans receives Medicaid.