Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
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The most critical nexus in the free market is the transactions that occur when willing sellers and interested buyers meet. One does not usually look to the federal government to resolve concerns that the costs of particular goods or services are too high. Sometimes there are exceptions. There is general agreement, for example, that the government can and should act when a company’s control of all or most of a single market allows it to act in ways adverse to the best interests of consumers. Now...
The lockdowns instituted during the COVID pandemic were only supposed to last a few days. Remember, “14 days to flatten the curve” was all that was needed to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed by patients infected with the rapidly spreading novel coronavirus. Two weeks turned into three, then months. The impact was felt across the nation. Schools were closed, disrupting the education of millions of children. Businesses were shut down, leading to job losses and economic hardship. States lik...
It’s budget time again – and the one President Joe Biden proposed is a beaut! Biden’s budget proposal is the kind of thing only a progressive could get enthused about. It grows the executive branch’s regulatory power, takes total yearly spending to nearly $10 trillion by 2033 (up from just over $6 billion now, post-Covid) and depends on increased regulatory enforcement actions to bring additional revenue in. That last idea is especially bad. Biden ran for the nomination as the moderate alterna...
America’s high national living standards lead us to consider things like abundant access to clean water, comprehensive cellular service, and a reliable electric grid as commonplace. Much of the rest of the world regards them as luxuries, unavailable to many people. Consequently, we tend to think about these things only when they don’t work. Cloudy water creates a crisis. A cell phone outage leaves us stranded. Failures in the power market leave us, literally and figuratively, in the dark abo...
Despite the grim economic news, the V-shaped economic recovery President Donald Trump has talked about may soon be a reality. The news that several novel coronavirus vaccines will soon be available may allow the lockdowns to end. If all goes as planned, Operation Warp Speed could lead to the nation recovering lost economic ground in months rather than years, even if the number of cases continues to rise. Retailers across the country are contributing to Operation Warp Speed by ordering freezers,...
In an election year, you can’t go a day without hearing some politician somewhere cry out for reform of the nation’s healthcare system. Even former Vice President Joe Biden, whom the Democrats nominated for president last week, devoted a considerable portion of his acceptance speech to the issue. The solutions to the problems we face won’t be found by rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic system America has built to deliver healthcare and pay for it. What the policymakers should pursu...
America’s healthcare system is still a mess. The Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama’s signature legislative achievement, has sparked continued increases in premiums and deductibles while failing to bend the healthcare cost curve down as promised. That’s just one of the assurances ACA supporters made about the new law it failed to keep. Obama was badly misinformed when he promised people could keep the coverage they had, if they liked it, once the ACA became law. Some suggest he knew at the time...
It's not entirely clear what went wrong with Musk's rocket company SpaceX's recent test of its Crew Dragon launch vehicle, but something did. The smoke sent billowing upwards into Florida's warm spring air earlier this week suggests the problem was something major. The details are scarce. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine called the incident an "anomaly." Others have speculated an explosion within the Crew Dragon capsule might have caused the mishap. Both SpaceX and NASA have been reticent to...
In 2005, when Congress created the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), it was in expectation that the nation’s supply of gasoline would soon be supplemented by something other than etha- nol made from corn. Some of the best minds in science and engineering were say- ing with considerable confidence that the move from the research phase to commercially significant levels of production was just around the corner. The adoption of the RFS, which many states replicat- ed, turned out to be anoth- er m...
Though it’s cliche, Memorial Day reminds us that freedom isn’t free. It costs us, sometimes dearly. This is especially true when we find ourselves unprepared for a conflict we probably should have expected to be drawn into. America was not ready for World War I, for World War II, or for the Korean War. We weren’t even ready for the Iraq War, despite the fact it was initiated by the United States after all efforts at a negotiated settlement failed. As former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsf...
Over almost the entire course of the Obama presidency, congressional conservatives battled with the administration over the subsidies that were such an important part of renewable energy policy. Critics labeled them distortive of the marketplace, said they had an adverse effect on energy consumption, and put the government in the position of picking winners and losers, something that most definitely was not its job. Where these critics are now is a mystery, since hardly any are speaking out agai...
