Gridlock

A few years ago, Drew Carey of Reason.tv put together this excellent video about traffic in Los Angelas. After addressing the horrible traffic issues that L.A. residents battle every day, he suggested some solutions that have already succeeded in major cities around the world at reducing traffic problems. All of these examples were created by private companies. Often, all a city has to do to solve its biggest problems is reduce the limitations that are keeping private companies from solving them.

The Social Security Ponzi Scheme

The Cato Institute published a Policy Analysis paper by Michael D. Tanner in November, which compared social security to a ponzi scheme:

like a Ponzi scheme, Social Security does not actually save or invest any of a participant's payments. When a worker pays taxes into the system, that money is used to pay current beneficiaries. Therefore, participants receive payments, not from returns on their own investments, but directly from inflows from subsequent participants.

A highlight from the paper is a graph comparing return on capital to return on labor. Over the last 40 years, capital has outperformed labor consistently with only one exception (c.a. 1982).