Editorials

The free market dictates most of the business successes and failures we encounter on a daily basis. If you can find a niche, raise the capital and answer demand, you might succeed. If you can’t, you’ll fail.

The signs are everywhere across the West: Dry rangelands, fast-moving wildfires, endangered wildlife.

The city of Detroit sought bankruptcy protection last week, which was somewhat surprising. Hadn’t Detroit declared bankruptcy already?

Conventions are critically important to the Las Vegas economy, and not just the huge expos that take over multiple venues in the resort corridor. The myriad small conferences that come to every hotel every day support many thousands of jobs as well.

The single greatest accomplishment of all the firefighters, emergency responders and volunteers who battled this month’s Carpenter 1 Fire and helped displaced Mount Charleston residents? One of the worst natural disasters in Clark County history could have been much, much worse.

Government always seems to think it best knows how to run the lives of its citizens, but the marketplace consistently comes up with more efficient, less expensive responses to our needs than our elected and appointed officials. So it’s no surprise that in the realm of health care, against the backdrop of the junkyard blaze that is ObamaCare, some free-market thinking has proved extremely successful.

A lot of locals were never high on the proposed XpressWest high-speed rail project because the train initially would travel no farther than Victorville, Calif. The refrain from letters to the editor and talk radio shows: “Who in Las Vegas wants to take a train to Victorville, then have to rent a car to get to Los Angeles or San Diego?”

The Interstate 15 corridor between the Spaghetti Bowl and Sahara Avenue is the undisputed champion of traffic gridlock. It handles a whopping 250,000 vehicles per day, the busiest stretch of freeway in Nevada. The Nevada Department of Transportation wants to do something about the constant traffic jams, frequent wrecks and inefficient interchanges. Project Neon aims to address those issues, as well as future traffic growth.

The problem with electing judges is not the elections themselves. The problem is a lack of information for voters on the performance of judges. Judicial campaigns are seldom competitive, and they typically provide the electorate with little more than biographical information.