May you have a happy 2010th new year.

As the new year begins, I thought I'd do some blogging clean-up, so here are a handful of articles that I had sitting in my "Items to Blog About" queue, but never got around to using for one reason or another.

Charles Krauthammer on the New Socialism:

Since we operate an overwhelmingly carbon-based economy, the EPA will be regulating practically everything. No institution that emits more than 250 tons of CO2 a year will fall outside EPA control. This means more than a million building complexes, hospitals, plants, schools, businesses and similar enterprises. (The EPA proposes regulating emissions only above 25,000 tons, but it has no such authority.) Not since the creation of the Internal Revenue Service has a federal agency been given more intrusive power over every aspect of economic life. 

 Veronique de Rugy with the economic case against soda taxes:

The rationale behind a tax on soft drinks, or any sin tax, is that when the government raises prices on a certain good, it will become so expensive that consumers will give it up. Having been forced to eschew that sin because of the high monetary price, consumers will reap the moral and/or physical benefits of not indulging, thereby bettering themselves and society.
The story sounds plausible. The trouble is that sin taxers don’t appreciate human creativity: Consumers have a knack for replacing one sin with another. When the price of a “sinful” good increases, people often substitute an equally “bad” good in its place.

Victor Davis Hanson on the Long March from California to Copenhagen:

In truth, in some ways, the world economy depends every day on some engineer, farmer, architect, radiator shop owner, truck driver or plumber getting up at 5AM, going to work, toiling hard, and producing real wealth so that an array of bureaucrats, regulators, and redistributors can manage the proper allotment of much of the natural largess produced.
The whole system from California to Copenhagen will keep on working as long as the productive classes feel there are still incentives to jump out of bed at 5AM. When they don’t, the power is cut off to thousands of gears and cogs — and the world looks more like Ecuador or Somalia than the U.S.

Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz explain that markets fail, which is exactly why we need markets:

Given this dynamic, markets are unpredictable, prone to booms and busts, characterized by bouts of exuberance that are rational or irrational only in hindsight.  But markets are also the only reliable mechanism for sorting out this messy process quickly. In spite of the booms and busts, markets drive genuine long-run innovation and wealth creation.  When governments attempt to impose order on this chaotic and inherently risky process, they immediately run up against two serious dangers. 

The first is that they strangle new innovations before they can emerge. Thus proposals for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, a systemic risk regulator, a public health insurance plan, a green jobs policy, or any attempt at top-down planning may do more harm than good.
The second danger has to do with the nature of political economy. Politics creates its own kind of innovators who can be as destabilizing to markets as market actors themselves – but in far more pernicious ways. 

Economists call these political entrepreneurs  “rent-seekers.” Rent-seekers gain wealth, not by creating it, but by channeling it through political favors. Examples include government-sponsored monopolies, “targeted” tax breaks for special industries, and legislative loopholes inserted by lobbyists.

John Stossel argues that the House should adopt the filibuster:

Regardless of what senators in the 19th century had in mind, the filibuster is a wonderful antidote to the tyranny of the majority. It's no argument against it to say that the statists' favorite piece of legislation didn't fly through smoothly enough. They'll have to come up with a better case than that.
There is no greater threat to individual freedom and autonomy than government. The threat from private freelance crime is small potatoes compared to the daily usurpations of the state, with its taxation, regulation, privilege-granting, inflation, and war. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's immortal passage has never been topped:

To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place(d) under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored.

That just about covers it.

And, finally, in one of my favorite end of the year traditions, DJ Earworm mashes up the Top 25 hits of 2009.  Pure artistic genius.  (Here are his 2007 and 2008 editions).