Mark J. Perry on Wasteful Recycling

Mark J. Perry, who holds two graduate degrees in Economics, is a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan's Flint campus, and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.  His popular economics Blog is called: Carpe Diem.
 Last Sunday, he published a post discussing the wasteful activity of recycling, which has become a pseudo religion for folks who more than anything want to feel good about themselves.
Here's just the opening paragraph of the post:

In 1996, New York Times science columnist John Tierney wrote an article that appeared in the New York Times Magazine about compulsory recycling titled “Recycling is Garbage.”  Tierney’s controversial argument in that article can be summarized as follows: Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America. Tierney wrote, “Rinsing out tuna cans and tying up newspapers may make you feel virtuous, but it’s a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources. Americans have embraced recycling as a transcendental experience, an act of moral redemption. We’re not just reusing our garbage; we’re performing a rite of atonement for the sin of excess.” Now you can understand why Tierney’s recycling article set the all-time record for the greatest volume of hate mail ever recorded in the history of the New York Times Magazine.

You can read the entire post of Professor Perry by clicking HERE.

To read the 1996 piece by John Tierney, go HERE.

Contrasting CEOs and What They Wrought

Arthur Herman, a visiting scholar at AEI, wrote an insightful piece at National Review Online yesterday about two very different kinds of men who have served as CEO of General Motors (unfortunately, one of them still does). Mr. Herman is the author of Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009.

The first CEO discussed by Mr. Herman is "General Motors’ current CEO, Dan Akerson, who last Monday told the Detroit News that Congress needs to slap a dollar-a-gallon tax on gasoline. That way Americans won’t buy as many gasoline-powered cars and will be forced to turn to alternative vehicles instead. That’ll be good for the environment, he claimed. But it will also be good for sales of his Chevy Volt, which, despite a hefty government subsidy, has more wheels than buyers." You got to love that guy, right?

Former CEO Bill Knudsen, on the other hand, happens to be the man who made General Motors the greatest automobile company in the world (notice past tense).

"William Signius Knudsen arrived in this country as a Danish immigrant and started work with a gang of Irish riveters in a Brooklyn shipyard. Then he moved to Buffalo to work in a bicycle factory, making parts for Henry Ford’s Model T. Ford was so impressed with Knudsen’s skill in organizing the shop floor that he brought him to his Detroit Highland Park plant in 1913, where Knudsen turned the mass-production technique Ford had created there into a flexible system that could be set up anywhere. Knudsen built more than 20 Ford plants around the country and in Europe. Then in 1922 he moved to GM, where he used the same flexible mass production to introduce the idea of annual model changes for cars.

"Knudsen’s idea revolutionized the American auto industry. It turned Chevrolet from GM’s biggest money-loser into its lead division, surpassing Ford in sales in 1931.

"He did it all with no government subsidies or loans. He saw his duty as making a better car at a lower cost, not asking Washington to raise his customers’ costs."

To read the entire article, click on the link below.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/269356/tale-two-gm-ceos-arthur-herman

Six Modest Proposals (for the 112th Congress)

Charles Murray, American Enterprise Institute scholar, and author of The Bell Curve posted this the other on the The Enterprise Blog.

Six Modest Proposals

Charles Murray: Expert Profiling Preferred

Charles Murray, of The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) offers his view on the name "Homeland" Security, and argues for the right kind of profiling to keep air travelers safe.

When the Department of Homeland Security was created, the very name was unsettling. “Homeland” sounded vaguely totalitarian, a word that the Third Reich or USSR propagandists might use, not a word in the American lexicon. In the wake of 9/11, a lot of us swallowed our objections and muttered, “Well, okay, but be careful how far you take this stuff.” What’s happening at the TSA is why we were apprehensive.

The Dept. of Homeland Security Increasingly Resembles Its Name