Author: Evan Sparks

Articles

A Valuable New Airline Service You May Not Have Noticed

The last time I flew on Ryanair, Europe’s scrappy low-cost airline, I sensed some message confusion. Its garish blue-and-yellow planes and spartan terminals bear slogans such as “The Low Fares Airline,” “The On Time Airline,” “Fly Cheaper,” and even one that read “Europe’s Favourite Airline”—an obvious dig at its larger rival British Airways, whose longtime slogan was “The World’s Favourite Airline.”

Ryanair gets its share of bad press, and while I’ve never had an unpleasant flight on the airline, I’ve never had a particularly pleasant one either. It is a truly no-frills experience—no window shades, no reclining seats, charges for checked luggage, everything on the plane for sale. So can it really be Europe’s favorite airline? Can it be anybody’s favorite airline? Continue reading “A Valuable New Airline Service You May Not Have Noticed”

Unknown's avatarEvan Sparks
Reviews

Friendly Fire

After the Republicans’ “thumpin’,” as President Bush described it, in the 2006 midterm elections, the recent host of books offering a scathing conservative critique of the Bush administration and the Republican-controlled 107th, 108th, and 109th Congresses look prescient.

It’s getting hard to keep the titles straight: In 2003 and 2004, left-wing critics offered Worse than Watergate, American Dynasty, The Price of Loyalty, Losing America, and The Politics of Truth. Beginning with Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy, by former Reagan administration official Bruce Bartlett, conservatives and libertarians are catching up, venting their pent-up frustration with the Bush White House and the Republican leadership in Congress in book form. Continue reading “Friendly Fire”

Unknown's avatarEvan Sparks
Articles

The Economy of God

Everywhere in the United States, people have more consumer choice in their exercise of religion than they do in almost any other sector of the economy. Individual parish churches, regardless of denominational affiliation, function as independent contractors of salvation in America’s religious free market. Christianity in the United States is dynamic, and American church history is littered with the relics and ruins of denominational change and theological innovation.

The brewing schism in the Episcopal Church, for example, should surprise no one familiar with the workings of America’s religious free market. Continue reading “The Economy of God”

Unknown's avatarEvan Sparks
Articles

Unfree as a Bird

Picking on outrageous federal entitlements, pork-barrel programs, and regulatory regimes trims the national budget about as much as plucking a straw from a haystack. But one program deserves special commendation for achieving the trifecta of bad governance: regressive transfers, inefficiency, and inhibited innovation. I refer to the Essential Air Service (EAS) program of the Department of Transportation, which subsidizes scheduled air service to rural communities far from major airline hubs.

These routes are the back roads of skies, serving unknown hamlets like Show Low, Arizona; Thief River Falls, Minnesota; and Greenbrier, West Virginia. They are generally poorly traveled, costing American taxpayers millions every year to subsidize. Continue reading “Unfree as a Bird”

Unknown's avatarEvan Sparks
Articles

The Ties that Bind

Attire, for whatever reason, has always been a favorite frontier for young people to battle the norms of their elders. At my Memphis high school, the boys once objected to the neckties we were made to wear: to their constriction, to their formality, and, most of all, to their impracticality. We raised the great rallying cry of modernity, “They’re not good for anything!” One of our teachers gamely played along.

The uselessness of the necktie is its virtue, he said. It gives us not only the obvious, an appreciation for ornament, but also something far more valuable: a way of expressing our human character that is not explained by our immediate needs or wants. Continue reading “The Ties that Bind”

Unknown's avatarEvan Sparks