By Krisztina Pusok, American Consumer Institute With the economy still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, there are growing calls to ease competition in the labor market by restricting immigration. But these policies overlook the fact that highly educated foreign graduates from U.S. universities act as a stopgap for a shortage of American STEM graduates. Before taking […]
Author: Erik Sass
California’s anti-freelance law violates free speech
By Trevor Burrus, courtesy of the Cato Institute On January 1, 2020, California Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5) went into effect, drastically curtailing Californians’ freedom to work on their own terms as freelancers. The law, which was written by the AFL-CIO, presents many freelancers in the state with only two options: find a permanent employer willing to […]
Emergency COVID-19 Stimulus Programs Are a Short-Term Solution
By Thomas Hoenig, courtesy of the Mercatus Center The federal government and the Federal Reserve have implemented unprecedented spending and monetary policies to combat the economic crisis resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. These policies, while necessary in the short term, place an ever larger mortgage against the nation’s future income; and extending them […]
TV White Space Technology Could Help Close the Digital Divide, and Not Just Hypothetically
Krisztina Puzok, American Consumer Institute The use of TV white spaces (TVWS) — the unused spectrum in between TV channels — has brought telehealth services to residents in Logan, OH, broadband access to a remotely located elementary school in Claudeville, VA, and a smart grid to Plumas County, CA. Meanwhile more than 25 percent of […]
Coronavirus Has More Americans Rethinking Plastic
This article was originally published in Issues & Insights. By Bill Collier and Jon Decker One overlooked policy response to the coronavirus has been a changing of attitudes toward plastic. While plastic has drawn the ire of environmentalists in recent years due to concerns regarding pollution, some businesses are now being forced to […]
Free Private Cities: The Future of Governance
By Titus Gebel, Free Private Cities One thing that COVID-19 will probably change, even after the virus is no longer an immediate threat, is the number of home workers. This number is supposed to remain higher than it was before. Under duress, companies found out that many jobs can indeed be done remotely, saving […]
Review of “There & Back Again”, by D.M. Cummings
By Calum Nicholson, UK Correspondent The prolific blogger and former Russian airline executive D.M. Cummings famously broke into fiction with his 2016 conspiracy thriller Let’s Leave!, which became a bestseller and publishing phenomenon in the UK, following a scrappy marketing campaign that went unexpectedly viral. It’s a tale that itself hardly needs recounting. A […]
Europe urgently needs a capital markets union
By Maria Demertzis, courtesy of the Bruegel Institute Necessary though it was, the temporary relaxation of state aid rules in the EU has brought grave unintended consequences. Through indiscriminate support, the EU is rapidly moving from an even playing field that promotes the “survival of the fittest” to a situation where only those […]
The Great EU Airline Refund Scam
By Bill Wirtz, courtesy of the Austrian Economics Center At first 12, now 16 EU member states are looking to overturn rules requiring airlines to refund passengers with cash payments if their flight had been cancelled as a result of COVID-19 travel restrictions. The companies have been lobbying the European Council to disable […]
Pandemic highlights Latin American innovators – and laggards
By Federico N. Fernández, Somos Innovación The innovation scene in Latin America shows two faces that couldn’t be more different from each other. I think the following three examples help us to explain what I see: Just a year ago, a group of Chilean Senators proposed a bill called “decent digital […]