Typhoid Mary-land sickens US Competitive Well-Being

The US acted yesterday to sustain domestic economic growth and long-term development threatened by visa restrictions on foreign students and visiting businessmen imposed after 9/11. Businessmen had complained of long visa delays and the brightest foreign students had begun to go elsewhere despite the US lead in higher educational opportunities:

The
Financial Times, delivered daily to my doorstep, spells out the new steps taken by the State Dept and Office of Homeland Security.

Coincidentally, today’s FT has another article which underlines the US’s gain in productivity growth vis-?-vis Britain, France, and Germany. Perhaps the major reason for America's paramount status in world-wide productivity, the article says, is American labor policies and European central planning. Europe’s trade unions bear much of the responsibility for stunted growth and even decline in productivity in these advanced economies.

Finally, the resident genius of FT’s OpEd page,
Martin Wolf spells out what every businessman knows in an article "Competition would overthrow the tyranny of vested interests":

Knowledge of how to run economic activities productively is no mystery
The world's most successful businesses know how to do this in every imaginable sector. Investors are also desperately seeking opportunities for profitable investment across the globe. Yet they cannot find them in many countries where existing producers are grotesquely inefficient.

Unfortunately, the rest of the article on-line is free-trial restricted, but I’ll share the next paragraph:

…..people with power--incumbent businesses, corrupt bureaucrats and politicians, possessors of sinecures, protected workers in formal employment and beneficiaries of government subsidies--combine to oppose the competition that would force uncomfortable economic changes. Anti-market intellectuals also laud this recalcitrance. The result is a pervasive bias against competition.

The state of Maryland is rife with corrupt bureaucrats and politicians, starting at the top with Senators Sarbanes and Mikulski. Also with anti-market intellectuals, including a Marxist economics professor of our acquaintance at the U. of Maryland. Protected workers and government subsidies thrive in specially-contrived economic niches all over the state.

And big union bosses in DC questionably employing union dues for political purposes have decided that the corrupt state next door was just the place to plant the big unions' MSM-supported campaign against Wal-Mart.

PBS'Frontlinebegan the MSM campaign with an hour-long presentation of Blue-State economic theory concluding that Wal-Mart's low prices and vendor discounts overseas were bad for the American consumer. That Marxist prof at U. of Maryland could have written the script [or screenplay, as this was definitely a dream fantasy of the left],

Maryland is pretty much an example on how growth and productivity are thwarted by a corrupt political culture aided by national unions and supported by the Democratic Party. The same corrupt culture that nourished Baltimore-native Nancy Pelosi in her political youth.

As the UK learned from eight years under Labour government, productivity declines under management by big-government parties and their trade-union allies.

If the Maryland law stands up in court, Target, Federated Department Stores, and other companies competing with Wal-Mart will win in Democratic legislatures what they can't win in the marketplace. Market share at the expense of the consumer and overall economic efficiency.

And the U.S. will lose the cutting edge of its supremacy in productivity per GDP dollar---its competitive edge.