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Daily Archives: May 24, 2013

Skagit River Bridge Collapse

By | | Transportation
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Within minutes of the announcement that a bridge on Interstate 5 in Washington state had collapsed, people posted comments saying that this was further proof that our infrastructure was in terrible shape and that America was becoming a third-world country. The comments then descended into a debate over whether the Repubicans or Democrats were to blame for this sorry state of affairs.

Click image for a larger view. Flickr photo by Martha T.

This morning, the Washington Department of Transportation announced that the collapse happened when an oversized truck hit an overhead span. The 58-year-old bridge’s most recent maintenance inspection, in 2010, found that it was in “better than minimum adequacy to tolerate being left in place as is.”

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Should Free-Market Advocates Support Limits on Food Stamps?

By | | News commentary
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Here’s a toughie. Assume you support free-markets. That means you probably oppose government limits on what foods people can buy, such as New York Mayor Bloomberg’s so-called Big Gulp ban. A major reason for opposing such bans is that the government isn’t really capable of deciding what is healthy or unhealthy. If we ban sugary drinks, shouldn’t we also ban cholesterol-filled red meat? Vegan diets don’t have enough vitamin B-12, so maybe we should ban tofu. On the other hand, maybe Coca-Cola can escape the ban if it adds B-12 to its drinks.

The point is that free-market advocates oppose government control of what people eat because what gets labeled “healthy” or “unhealthy” will depend more on political power, fads, and urban folklore than on science and reason. Moreover, just as it is hard to end the corn ethanol program, once government labels something healthy or unhealthy, it will become very hard to change that label even if research proves it wrong.

On the other hand, the federal government gives out $75 billion a year in food stamps (technically the “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program” or SNAP). The National Center for Public Policy Research considers itself a free-market advocate, yet it argues that food stamps should be dedicated only to healthy foods–and that the corporations that sell unhealthy foods shouldn’t lobby to keep their products in the program.

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