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Reason Alert - February 25,
2011
- Wisconsin Shows What a
Broke Democracy Looks Like
- How Public Pensions
Killed California
- California’s Ailing
Economy
- President Obama’s WTF
Tour
- Don’t Take the Oscars
Too Seriously
- The Mind of a Police Dog
- Losing the Brains Race
- India and China Have
Nothing On Us
Wisconsin Shows What a
Broke Democracy Looks Like
“Wisconsin is an early sign of the stresses that will either shift our
system of government action and spending to something unrecognizable to
those who lived in the post-WW II boom years or tear that system
apart,” Reason magazine’s Brian Doherty writes. “And everyone seems
ready to fight about this necessary shift. The White House has its
hands in. The AFL-CIO is reviving the old anarcho-syndicalist dream of
the general strike to show that all labor is feeling the pain of
Wisconsin’s public unions. People all over the globe are delivering
pizzas in solidarity. Both sides of the larger debate about government
spending are busing in their forces. Progressives are calling for
national anti-austerity protests this weekend. We may not be France
yet, but there are disturbing signs that Americans may be ready to take
to the streets angrily in defense of their government deals and
giveaways. (Some polls showing a lack of support for the very idea of
public employee unions are encouraging, but it doesn’t take a majority
to cause civil unrest.) Wisconsin may be the first sign that, no matter
how much support one can gin up for shrinking government, actual
attempts to restrain a free-spending government will be met with strong
political counterforce-even when that interest is overpaid teachers and
big-money unions. The threat of federal government shutdown, happening
simultaneously with the Wisconsin crisis, demonstrates that the fiscal
crisis is multileveled, and no one wants to allow it to be dealt with
seriously.”
More Wisconsin Coverage:
Matt Welch on Gov. Walker’s “Koch” Phone Call
Evil Koch Bros Support Drug Legalization, Gay Marriage, Reduced Defense
Spending
Steve Chapman: How Public Employees and Taxpayers Got Scammed
Peter Suderman Discusses WI on Freedom Watch
Welch: We Are Living in Andy Stern’s “Ugly” Democracy
How Public Pensions Killed
California
In his cover story for the March issue of Reason magazine, Tim
Cavanaugh writes: “In the next 10 years, taxpayers will most likely be
on the hook for somewhere between $325 billion and $500 billion [in
pension liabilities]. (Over the past five years, state revenues
averaged $94.5 billion per year.) How did this happen?
California’s state and local governments employ somewhere between 1.5
million and 2 million workers, representing 4 percent to 5 percent of
the state’s total population. When they retire, all of those employees
are contractually entitled to generous pension benefits-so generous
that, collectively, they can’t be paid even by a pension system that
ladles out more than $20 billion a year and is one of the largest
investment pools on Wall Street. California is not the only state
infected by pension liabilities, but the size of its economy (generally
described as the eighth largest in the world) and its union-dominated
politics make it a gravely stricken, and potentially contagious,
patient.”
Matt Welch Discusses Pensions on KPCC Radio
California’s Ailing Economy
“California provides a pure test case of interventionist economics in
the United States. With effective one-party rule under the Democrats,
the most restrictive environmental laws in the country, a rapidly
growing public sector, and regulations on virtually every aspect of
human behavior, the Golden State is the perfect laboratory for the
managed economy the rest of the country rejected in November. When the
experiment inevitably fails, perhaps the self-defeating mind-set that
created it will finally dissipate. Or that hope may prove to be the
biggest fantasy of all.” - Reason’s Tim Cavanaugh
President Obama’s WTF Tour
“President Barack Obama is sliding deep into a ‘Win the Future’ (WTF)
tour, during which he battles economic stagnation and his own ruinous
spend-and-regulate-til-the-cows-come-home policies (and those of his
immediate predecessor) by the profligate use of clichés. His latest
stop was in Cleveland, Ohio, dubbed ‘the most miserable city’ in the
U.S. just last year by Forbes magazine. In search of support for a
budget that even his fans found pathetic and some votes in 2012, Obama
spoke as if he had transported back to 1950, when ‘the Mistake on the
Lake’ was peaking in population growth.” - Reason.com Editor in Chief
Nick Gillespie
Don’t Take the Oscars Too
Seriously
In his Reason.com column, Kurt Loder says, “The Oscars, like such
less-exalted entertainments as dwarf-tossing and butter-eating
contests, are inconsequential fun. They may reflect only the dubious
judgments of a self-selected group of movie-biz insiders, but amid the
raucous, taunting merriment in our living rooms, we happily ignore
that.”
Video: Academy Awards Alert! Why You Might Be a Fashion Criminal
The Mind of a Police Dog
Reason magazine’s Radley Balko writes that professional “dog/handler
teams correctly completed a search with no alerts in just 21 of the 144
walk-throughs. The other 123 searches produced an astounding 225
alerts, every one of them false...Dogs can be valuable investigative
tools. They are great, for example, at following a scent in searches
for suspects or sniffing out survivors after a disaster. The
bomb-detecting dogs in Iraq and Afghanistan are successful because
their handlers have no preconceptions about where bombs may lie.
Indeed, they are putting their lives in the dogs’ paws. With no cues
from their masters to cloud their judgment, the dogs are free to go
about their task unbiased. But while Canis domesticus retains many of
its wilder relative’s sensory abilities, it is in many ways a man-made
animal. When we don’t take that reality into account, a dog can be
worse than useless. But that’s not the dog’s fault. It’s ours.”
Balko Talks Police Dogs With Andrew Napolitano
Losing the Brains Race
Reason magazine columnist Veronique de Rugy examines why more education
spending isn’t resulting in better results.
India and China Have Nothing On Us
In her column for the The Daily iPad publication, Reason Foundation’s
Shikha Dahlmia suggests looking at the bright side: America does not
have India’s infrastructure deficit or China’s civil society deficit;
America does not have grinding poverty; and American education is
vastly superior to India’s or China’s.
Read the teasers with links to the full stories at Reason Foundation
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