A Stitch in Haste

Anyone still pretending that China's authoritarians are committed to free-market principles?
Companies in two Chinese provinces, Shandong and Hubei, have been told they must seek official consent if they want to lay off more than 40 people. The order highlights the Chinese authorities' concern over mounting job losses.
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The Chinese authorities are keen to avoid social instability, [...]

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Another oblivious contribution from the increasingly silly New York Times "Ethicist" column. The question put to him:
I own a busy cafe-delicatessen with 25 employees. All the workers except two enjoy listening to background music from the radio while they work, as do I; those two say it irritates them, gives them headaches and makes it [...]

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Barney Frank calls for making Wall Street bonuses illegal:
"There should be a moratorium on bonuses," Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, told reporters yesterday in Washington. "They have a negative incentive effect because they are the ones that say if you take a risk and it pays off you get a big bonus," and if it causes [...]

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We interrupt our regularly scheduled marriage blogging to bring you … marriage blogging:
Young people believe, according to the survey, that the main reason for marriage is "commitment". But Thatcherism drove the concept of commitment out of working-class lives: the commitment of employers to their workers, of workers to their unions, of skilled men and women [...]

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Several commentators (as well as one commenter here) duly noted how an early Associated Press account of Treasury Secretary Paulson's $250 billion partial nationalization of major banks quoted him as saying that the offer was "not voluntary."
Later versions of the report mysteriously purged those two words. As I noted previously, the Bank of Orwell seems [...]

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Talk about missing the point:
It would seem that Obama has been studying the 1932 campaign of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The key to Roosevelt's victory was not a big program but a jaunty sense of optimism in the midst of despair that led to his signature inaugural line — "the only thing we have to fear [...]

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At one end of the spectrum, we have the world's leading apologist for irrational primitivism (and earthly suffering), Pope Benedict XVI —
Pope Benedict XVI says the global financial crisis show the futility of money and ambition.
Benedict says that "now with the collapse of big banks we see that money disappears, is nothing and all [...]

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Just a quick pass-along:
In 2005, Kentucky imposed a 1.3% tax on the gross revenues of telecommunications providers. In connection with the new tax, the legislature banned providers from "collect[ing] the tax directly" from consumers and from "separately stat[ing] the tax on the bill." The providers filed this lawsuit because they want to identify the new [...]

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One Florida municipality is forced to ponder the question:
Treasure Island residents might be paying $100 for library cards within the next few weeks.
City commissioners do not want to contribute more than $100,000 to the Gulf Beaches Public Library. Vice mayor Bob Minning says that is part of a shift in budget philosophies. [...]

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I was only semi-seriously skimming a blogpost about the purported "costs" of privatization when I stumbled upon this tidbit:
The privatization process also laid waste to jobs that, while low paid, provided good benefits, civil service protection, union representation, and self-respect. Those lost jobs represent costs, personal and public, tangible and intangible.
This gobbledygook mirrors the one [...]

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