Economic Freedom

The Coronavirus has clobbered the world economy but for the travel and hospitality industries, it has become an existential crisis.  The consequences are lingering far too long with no end in sight.  Two good examples to examine are the airlines and airports.  The data is really ugly but it is right there on the TSA website for all to see — the daily number of passengers screened by the Transportation Security Administration.

I highly recommend “Great Society” (the book not the policies).  It is a great tutorial on how a large group of really bright people with good intentions can make a bad situation even worse with poorly conceived and uncoordinated solutions.  

Mississippi could soon be getting a passenger rail route between New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama, with most of the stops in the Magnolia State. The downside is taxpayers, at both the state and federal levels, will heavily subsidize the Amtrak route.

Mississippi has been called the “moocher state” because it takes in more federal aid than it sends back to Washington, D.C. in taxes. The non-partisan Tax Foundation ranked Mississippi as the state most dependent on federal funds as a percentage of its revenues, with Louisiana second.

It’s been 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union.  Americans who witnessed those momentous events assumed communism had finally been consigned to the dustbin of history.  Not so fast, fast forward to 2019 and it’s déjà vu.  

America once again confronts communism, albeit a different strain with a quasi-capitalistic twist.  Now it is China.

It took less than 15 years for Facebook to rocket from a Harvard dorm room to one of the most valuable companies on the planet.  Now in just one week it has lost more than $52 billion in market value.  This begs several questions.  Do friends and friends of friends want to be surveilled?  Is a great company built on monetizing mountains of personal data through undisclosed means a sustainable business over the long term?