Author Archive | Todd Zywicki

Hans Bader calls my attention to this victory for the United States in an unusual voting rights case in the 5th Circuit. Why ? Because it documents ongoing voting rights violations by the black majority against the white minority in a county in Mississippi. Hans A. von Spakovsky summarizes the case and criticizes the DOJ’s […]

The Forbes.com article is here. Looks like the video of the full interview will be running on NRO this week. The first installment is here.

If you are in the vicinity of George Mason Law School this evening, you are invited to a public program at the law school (the organizers asked me to post this): Perspectives on Preemption: Federalism and the State AGs ___________________ MONDAY, MARCH 16 George Mason University School of Law 3301 N. Fairfax Drive, Arlington, VA […]

Looks like Madoff going to the clink is also going to mean the end of a serious money train for a lot of politicians according to this report by Open Secrets. As recently as September 2008 he wrote a $25,000 check to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (see here). Googling around I haven’t been able […]

While riding the Metro the other day I saw an ad for the website econ4u.org, which provides information on personal financial literacy. The form of the ad is what caught my eye–it had a quiz and this was the question: If faced with an unexpected cash need, which of these options will typically cost the […]

It would be hard to imagine finding a Treasury Secretary worse than Hank Paulson. But there is a growing consensus in Washington that as bad as Paulson was, Timothy Geithner may be even more incompetent: When they start making jokes about you, it’s hard to recover. And that’s what is happening now to Treasury Secretary […]

I’m not an expert on the Patriot Act, but I confess that my general impression of it is negative (all these libertarians I hang around with, I guess). But my colleague Nathan Sales has a column in the Christian Science Monitor that gives me some pause. His argument is that the Act itself is fundamentally […]

UPDATE 8:31 p.m.: I just received an email that this version on Thomas, although the most recent that is there, is the version of legislation as it was introduced yesterday and doesn’t contain action on amendments. But from what I can tell reading news stories, the provisions I focus on below (the “void against public […]

John Rosenberg has a long post on the Virginia Bar’s efforts to promote “diversity” and whether they would survive a legal challenge.

Peter Robinson has a piece in Forbes.com today on the discovery by David Brooks, Christopher Buckley, and David Gergen that President Obama is actually a liberal: A couple of implications here are worth noting. The first is that a deep, recurring pattern of American life has asserted itself yet again: the cluelessness of the elite. […]

My colleague J.W. Verret has an interesting article on Forbes.com on the dangers of public ownership of banks and why government investment may be “self-defeating” in returning them to financial health: This is because governments have two unique qualities: immunity from insider trading laws and a political interest in using their shareholder power to pander […]

Substantive regulation of consumer credit generally has one intended effect and three unintended consequences. The good effect is less of whatever it is that is regulated. So if regulators cap interest rates through usury regulations, for instance, interest rates on average will be lower. But there are also unintended consequences: (1) term repricing (i.e., substitution […]

David Brooks is surprised that it turns out that Obama actually is a liberal after all: Those of us who consider ourselves moderates

One issue that people have kicked around a bit is the risk of inflation embedded in the current fiscal and monetary policy being used to fight the recession and credit squeeze. With respect to fiscal policy, the concern is probabilistic–will it be possible to fund the massive budget deficits, and now creation and expansion of […]

I had the privilege of recently sitting down with my colleague and friend Russ Roberts for his podcast “Econtalk” to discuss issues of consumer credit and consumer bankruptcy. The interview is here along with some excerpted highlights. Russ’s podcast is great and he is a marvelous interviewer, so check out some of his other podcasts […]