Brian Gongol
Illinois has a state school board that has decided to ban junk food and pop in all vending machines in elementary and middle schools. While it's perfectly fine to want to protect the health of children, bans like this just aren't the efficient way to do it. First, it trumps local school districts' authority, which is hardly ever a good idea. Moreover, it teaches kids all the wrong lessons: That you can't take care of yourself as well as the government can, that everything must be judged on its worst possible use, and that everything that can be bad should be banned. Kids who are going to eat badly will still have plenty of opportunity to do so at home, where their parents probably don't care anyway. Kids need to learn how to make good decisions about balance between healthy and unhealthy foods -- not that government's responsibility is to "protect" them from every possible risk.
Good news: The markets won, and Google has prevailed over the Department of Justice and won't be turning over huge amounts of search-engine data. Google's leadership didn't have to care about rights in order to do the right thing to protect Americans' rights -- they just had to care about pleasing their customers, who probably would have punished Google for giving away their data.
Very bad news: Congress has raised the debt ceiling to $9 trillion. The increase alone was one and a half times the entire gross domestic product of Poland. That's positively staggering.
Sign up for weekly updates on the show!