New at Reason: John Stossel on the Alpaca Bubble and Negative Unintended Consequences

Messenger: Fly-arounds have unintended consequences
JEFFERSON CITY • Governors navigate dangerous territory when they travel around the state touting Economic Development projects. I learned that little lesson for the first time more than two decades ago covering one of Colorado Gov. Roy Romer's "Dome on the Range" tours. Back then, Romer was doing much what his fellow Democrat, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, is doing these days. He was traveling from big cities to little towns across the state, holding news conferences to talk about jobs the sta...

Unintended Consequences of the Good Kind
Thanks again, Wikileaks! Wired magazine’s contributing editor Noah Shachtman — a nonresident fellow at the liberal Brookings Institution — researched the 400,000 WikiLeaked documents released in October. Here’s what he found: "By late 2003, even the Bush White House’s staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. But WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq War documents reveal that for years afterwa...

Unintended Consequences
Please read our About Page, our Disclaimer, and our Comments Policy. Please note: InformationLiberation is neither liberal or conservative. When one takes the time to research the "liberal elite," whom the Conservatives oppose, and the "conservative elite," whom the liberals oppose, one finds both "elite" are one and the same. "Liberal" or "Conservative" is not a substantive choice, it is only the carefully crafted illusion of a choice, for both parties come together when they are instructed to....

Uncle Sam Will Help Buy You an Alpaca
I often bash government. I say it can't do anything better than people in a Free Market. But the government is unequalled in producing one thing: negative Unintended Consequences. Show me a government activity, and I will show you bad results that even the program's advocates probably don't like. Here's one example. Congressmen say our government should "support and strengthen family-based agriculture." Abstractly, supporting family-based agriculture sounds good. Government policies often ha...

A Brief History of Earmarks
Some in Washington seem to believe that the way our nation currently funds infrastructure projects is the only way. For example,  Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) told Politico: Let’s look at transportation. How do you handle that without Earmarks, since that’s a heavily earmarked bill? How do you handle a Corps of Engineers project? I think, right now, we go through a period where we have gone one step further than we meant to go, and there are some Unintended Consequences. But as the chart to

Expedia makes American Air fares harder to find
American's ticket prices are no longer displayed in Expedia's initial search results. Consumers must click through to a separate Expedia page to get detailed information on flights and airfares. The unit of AMR Corp is also no longer one of the first carriers to be displayed on Expedia when consumers make flight queries. "This has been done in light of both American Airlines' recent decision to prevent Orbitz from selling its inventory and a possible disruption in Expedia's ability to sell Amer...

Christina Gagnier: In a Rare Moment, Consensus Reached in Net Neutrality Debate
The FCC should at least get credit for the one thing they accomplished with today's Net Neutrality vote: they brought both sides of a critical issue together to declare a collective "WTF," most appropriate considering the Commission's policy on wireless. Prepared statement after prepared statement, the Commission did nothing to move the discussion of Net Neutrality forward. The ruling today will not preserve the open Net; instead, the Commission's half-hearted attempt to maintain relevance wil...