In "Traffic," a fascinating survey of the oddities and etiquette of driving, Ted Vanderbilt explains why we have such views. Cars, he notes, isolate us from social contact, converting us into ego machines. But when a traffic light fails and we must all stop at an intersection, we look at one another, gesture politely and take turns.

Several European experts have built on this notion by changing how cars go through towns -- not by using speed bumps and traffic signs but by putting a child's bike beside the road, lowering curbs and having intersecting roads meet at right angles with no stop signs or lights. The experts have put such ideas into practice in towns in the Netherlands and Denmark and in London. Chaos? Not at all. Drivers slowed down, taking time to get through the mental speed bumps. Fewer accidents but not as much speed.

Obamanomics Is a Recipe for Recession

What if I told you that a prominent global political figure in recent months has proposed: abrogating key features of his government's contracts with energy companies; unilaterally renegotiating his country's international economic treaties; dramatically raising marginal tax rates on the "rich" to levels not seen in his country in three decades (which would make them among the highest in the world); and changing his country's social insurance system into explicit welfare by severing the link between taxes and benefits?

The first name that came to mind would probably not be Barack Obama, possibly our nation's next president. Yet despite his obvious general intelligence, and uplifting and motivational eloquence, Sen. Obama reveals this startling economic illiteracy in his policy proposals and economic pronouncements. From the property rights and rule of (contract) law foundations of a successful market economy to the specifics of tax, spending, energy, regulatory and trade policy, if the proposals espoused by candidate Obama ever became law, the American economy would suffer a serious setback.

:[Jason] Furman and [Austan] Goolsbee are obviously in agreement with much of this agenda, and both have been strong advocates of progressive taxation. Goolsbee, in particular, has taken direct aim at the conservative movement's biggest economic policy achievement of the past three decades: the sharp reduction in marginal tax rates, especially the top personal income tax rate. He is a leader in the liberal onslaught against the Laffer Curve, producing research to show that income tax cuts "for high-income taxpayers likely gave windfalls to those whose incomes were already sharply rising because of broader market forces."

And, while both Furman and Goolsbee purport to believe in free trade, they seem to have no trouble working for a candidate with a pronounced and public protectionist bent. Obama's promise to reopen NAFTA alone should cause any degree of free-market economist pause. The facts about NAFTA's benefits are unassailable: Since its enactment in 1993 through 2001, U.S. employment increased from 120 million to 135 million. Jason Furman should certainly know the benefits of NAFTA inside and out; he served as a special economic assistant to President Bill Clinton, for whom the passage of NAFTA was a major political victory in 1993. That Furman and Goolsbee have suspended their belief in free trade does not bode well for how hard they would fight protectionism in an Obama White House.

The next president and his economic team will face enormous challenges--from managing the decline in the housing market to stabilizing the U.S. dollar and reducing energy prices. Furman and Goolsbee will be at the elbow of a President Obama, if there is one. To date, they have shown little appetite for fighting for free-market views and appear perfectly comfortable working for a candidate who is running on a statist platform of protectionism and bigger government.

...no one is pushing for drilling off the north shore of the United States — except the Canadians.

As it has for many years, a Canadian oil and gas company is pumping natural gas out of 480 wells in Lake Erie, most of them toward the eastern end of the lake.

Congress, meanwhile, has not undertaken any serious discussion of lifting the long-standing ban on oil and gas drilling in the U. S. waters of the Great Lakes.

“I don’t think the Great Lakes has ever even been a discussion item,” said Rep. John Peterson, who is preparing a bipartisan bill to reopen U. S. ocean waters to more drilling.

A ban on drilling in the lakes “makes no public policy sense,” given that the Canadians are already doing it, said Peterson, a Republican from Pennsylvania.

Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal pointed out that prominent Democrats from New York and Illinois were willing to short their own hometown energy commodity trading industries in order to join the bandwagon against the evil “speculators” in energy markets.

Did they follow the “uptick” rule? Did they even ask traders in Chicago or New York?

Dick Durbin, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer -- the home-state Senators of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Nymex, respectively -- need to decide if they're going to vote to wound the competitiveness of their shareholder-owned American brokerages. Not to mention the fact that increased foreign trading wouldn't be subject to CFTC scrutiny. Congressional rabble-rousers have exaggerated the problem of "dark" markets, but they certainly seem intent on creating more of them.

I saw your post last week, kindly referring to my earlier observation about the Senate bill to virtually abolish any commidities trading other than hedging.

“Voting with their feet” is one way to explain middle class (of all races) exodus from dangerous neighborhoods in poorly run American cities. Capital is the same. No one should forget that smart money leaves first, often preparing its next home far in advance of the crowds.

Bottom line: The orthodoxy against the free market moves too slowly and noisily to trap smart money.

Do Democrats want to chase money out of America?

Sounds crazy, but my “speculation” on their energy agenda is they like high gasoline prices because it fulfills their social engineering and environmental policy agendas.

That’s why they won’t allow a vote in the House on John Boehner’s “All of the Above” bill... because it will pass.

Just got back from a wonderful hiking vacation in the Colorado Rockies. I couldn't help but notice the utter devastation to Colorado's pine forests as I stood on top of several high summits during my adventure. Over the past few years, the Mountain Pine Beetle has destroyed hundreds of thousands of acres (perhaps millions of acres) of Colorado's beautiful pine forest.

The Pine Beetle bores into pine trees and puts a blue stain fungus into the tree, which blocks its intake of water and ultimately kills the tree. There are literally entire mountains here in Colorado without a single live pine tree (the entire tree has brown needles, probably good kindling for the next forest fire). Instead of viewing beautiful green pine forests, they're now reddish brown with their dried-up pine needles still on the tree.

So why do I bother you with all of this? Because I couldn't help but think that if MAN had created this latest disaster, liberals would never let us hear the end of it. But, since the devastation was wrought by [HOLY] Mother Nature, it's just fine. To quote the [liberal] U.S. Forest Service:

Beetle epidemics are natural processes that cycle over time and are one of nature's ways of rejuvenating forests.

To the liberals, Nature gets a pass. If [supposedly man-created] "global warming" burned up these pine trees, we'd never hear the end of how evil MAN is and how MAN must do something to rectify his evil ways (perhaps plant millions of new pine trees).

The same goes for forest fires. If a forest fire is Nature-caused (which most are), it's all "part of the natural cycle to clear the land for new trees". If a forest fire is caused by a careless camper, it's evil MAN again up to his old tricks. Or, God forbid, if an area of forest is cleared for the production of paper pulp, it is "devastating to the forest and contributes to global warming."

Once again, Nature (in the case of forest fires--lightning) gets a pass when forests are [temporarily] destroyed. MAN doesn't. Funny how Mother Nature's "free market" (i.e., the natural cycle of destruction and rebirth) is lauded by liberals, but MAN's free market is constantly attacked by liberals.

I absolutely agree with your basic point. But let me play devil's advocate and try to construct a somewhat reasonable version of an opposing view. It all rests on the fact that man is not a pine beetle.

Man is potentially far more destructive. The worst a pine beetle can do is wipe out the vegetation on several mountains, and only temporarily. Man, using nuclear weapons, could wipe out all life on earth, and forever.

Man is more valuable than a pine beetle. Presumably the cyclicality of the destruction of pine forests by the pine beetle and eventual resurrection of pine forests involves a large fall-off in the population of pine beetles at the bottom of the cycle. We should not be willing to allow man to over-consume his environmental endowment, and thus put his own population at risk.

All that is silent on whether global warming is man-made or not, and whether it is a serious threat or not, and so on. But abstractly, it makes sense to me to be watchful for the potentially man-destructive consequences of man's own activities -- for man's own sake.