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Writing in The Wall Street Journal , former Reason staffer Bill Kauffman reviews Hardy Green’s new book The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills That Shaped the American Economy . Though Green’s focus is mostly on private municipal enterprises like Hershey, Pennsylvania and Gary, Indiana (named after U.S. Steel Chairman Elbert Gary), Kauffman highlights Uncle Sam’s destructive contribution as well: Although Mr

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Capitalism and the Company Town

From Obama’s prepared remarks last night: As the leader of the free world, America will do more than just defeat on the battlefield those who offer hatred and destruction–we will also lead among those who are willing to work together to expand freedom and opportunity for all people.

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The President’s Contradiction Soup

Perhaps channeling Steve Martin  (another ’70s innovator), Michael Barone wants to get small: The Big Government of 1970 looked a lot like the Big Government of the 1940s. The same Big Businesses that dominated the Fortune 500 list in 1940 did so in 1970.

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Forget Gov’t, Biz, Labor: The Last Big Unit to Perform Worth a Damn Was Randy Johnson

Nobody landed with a parachute.

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OK, So Three Hours of Beck Can Get a Little Slow

UCLA Professor of Public Affairs Mark Kleiman is “angry about having too much crime and an intolerable number of people behind bars.” The United States is home to five percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, yet, says Kleiman, our high incarceration rate isn’t making us safer. In his book,  When Brute Force Fails , Kleiman explains that, when it comes to punishment, there is a trade-off between severity and swiftness. For too long the U.S.

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Reason.tv: Filling Up Prisons Without Fighting Crime-Mark Kleiman on America’s Criminal Justice System

“The denial of the possibility that there is an endpoint [to the welfare state] is crucial to the liberal enterprise,” says Dr. William Voegeli, author of the new book, Never Enough: America’s Limitless Welfare State and a visiting scholar at Claremont McKenna College’s Henry Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World. In this Reason.tv interview, Voegeli traces recent federal government expansions to President Franklin Roosevelt’s introduction of a “second Bill of Rights” that included the right to housing, education, and medical care

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Reason.tv: Never Enough – William Voegeli on America’s Limitless Welfare State

Anthony Robbins, the horse-jawed success coach and motivational speaker, puts aside optimism to tell his followers a gloomy tale of the Coming Economic Collapse. It’s “winter” in America, Robbins advises in this two-part video highlighted by DailyMarkets.com’s Michael Snyder

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Tony Robbins: Forget What I Said Before; We’re All Doomed

The campaign to end defined benefit plans for government employees has bogged down from Sacramento to Washington D.C. But in the increasingly Brigadoon-like “private sector,” DB plans have all but vanished.  Of the biggest companies in America, only 17 have yet to switch over to 401(k) or hybrid plans

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Only 17 Fortune 100 Companies Still Offer Defined Benefit Retirement Plans

“The greatest gift to the libertarian electorate was the Obama administration,” says John J. Pitney, Jr., a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and a Reason contributing editor . “At a time when you have massive expansion of government power and massive government spending, people start to see the downsides of that philosophy and the libertarian philosophy starts to become more appealing.” Pitney also tells Reason.tv why Rep

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Reason.tv: How Obama Revived the Freedom Movement – John J. Pitney, Jr. on the libertarian electorate