This Washington Post article reports that “the law of good, but not well thought out, governmental intentions” is again vetoed by the practicality of horse trough politics:

NEW YORK — Six months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Congress approved an $8 billion program to repair this city’s damaged office towers, build apartment buildings and finance the rebirth of the financial district.
But two years later, city records show that much of the money, dubbed Liberty Bonds, has gone to developers of prime real estate in midtown Manhattan and Brooklyn and to builders of luxury housing.

And who received this governmental perk? Yes, the businesspeople who needed it the least:

Local and state officials — over the objections of their own downtown development chief — gave one developer $650 million from the Liberty Bonds to erect an office tower for the Bank of America near Times Square, miles from the shattered precincts of Ground Zero. According to city records, another developer got $113 million to build a tower for Bank of New York in Brooklyn. One of the few projects downtown has gone to actor and sometime developer Robert De Niro, who picked up nearly $39 million from the bonds in November to build a boutique hotel in Tribeca, directly north of Ground Zero.

Congress designated $1.6 billion of the Liberty Bonds for rental housing for the tens of thousands of moderate-income residents who live in Lower Manhattan. Who got that money?:

Nearly all the money from those bonds has gone to prominent developers to build luxury apartment towers in the neighborhoods around Ground Zero, accelerating its transformation into one of New York’s richest neighborhoods, the city records show.

And what is the bureaucratic response to allegations of political favortism over the doling out of this financial largesse?:

State housing officials said that political favoritism played no part in their decisions and that loans were handed out “on a first-come, first-served basis.” Litwin, they say, had projects in the works and simply got in line when the Liberty Bonds came available.

To which Professor Sauer responds insightfully: “That’s it folks — projects already “in the works” get millions of subsidies. What good are the subsidies then?”

The always perceptive Professor Ribstein over at Ideablog asks this question: Given the volatility or oil prices and the adverse impact of high prices on the business of running an airline, why don’t airlines hedge their fuel costs?
The answer: Airlines generally are not, and never have been, particularly well-managed.
After a particularly unfulfilling experience in investing in airline stocks several years ago, Warren Buffett studied the industry and concluded, if one tabulates all of the airline industry’s finances since the day the Wright Brothers in 1903, one will discover that, cumulatively, there has not been a single penny of profit. Mr. Buffett has also suggested that, in hindsight, shooting down the Wright Brothers on that beach would have been a reasonable financial, if not moral, move.
However, one airline — Dallas-based Southwest Airlines — is and always has been well-managed. And guess who has been hedging its fuel purchases? Read about it here.
Update to this post here.