Mobile phones are becoming an increasingly popular way to make all sorts of payments. In America fans of the Atlanta Hawks have been testing specially adapted Nokia handsets linked to their Visa cards to enter their local stadium and to buy refreshments. Elsewhere schemes are more advanced. You can already pass the day in Austria without carrying cash, credit or debit cards by paying for everything, including consumer goods, with a mobile phone. Worldwide payments using mobile phones will climb from just $3.2 billion in 2003 to more than $37 billion by 2008.

Mobiles are used to buy lots of things in Asia. Earlier this month Visa and SK Telecom, South Korea’s leading mobile company, announced the commercial launch of a phone-payments system aimed initially at 30,000 subscribers. In Japan hundreds of thousands of transactions, from buying railway tickets to picking up groceries, already take place every day with customers passing their handsets across a device like that pictured above. Payments are confirmed with a sound like the bell of an old cash register.

1. The number of vehicles per workers are as follows:
Toyota 28 vehicles/worker
GM 25
Ford 22
VW 15
Chrysler 12.5

2. Toyota produces about the same number of cars as GM with 15% fewer workers.

3. Toyota produces roughly twice as many cars per worker as Ford or Chrysler.

Americans pay about double the world market price for sugar, a hidden tax that hurts everyone with a sweet tooth. Many beverage and food makers catering to that sweet tooth have long used corn syrup instead of sugar because it’s cheaper, but the price of corn syrup is beginning to rise. So now would be a good time for the U.S. government to revisit its destructive farm policies.

This is a classic case of a narrow, vocal lobby — sugar growers — benefiting at the expense of the larger economy. The latest victim of high-priced sweeteners is Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Enterprises Inc., the largest bottler of Coca-Cola products, which announced last week that it would cut 3,500 jobs because of a $1.1-billion loss in 2006. Other soft-drink makers, confectioners and food companies also pay a steep price for the complex system of price supports and import quotas aimed at protecting U.S. sugar growers by insulating them from global market realities.

From today’s LA Times, thanks to Club for Growth.

MP: The current world price of sugar is about 11 cents per pound, and the U.S. price is about 21 cents per pound, because of protectionist U.S. trade policy that protects inefficient domestic sugar beet farmers from more efficient sugar cane farmers in other countries.

Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs lambasted teacher unions today, claiming no amount of technology in the classroom would improve public schools until principals could fire bad teachers.

From the Houston Chronicle, via Club for Growth.

The long-awaited shakeout among real-estate agents is finally happening — much to the relief of those who are sticking with the business and prefer a bit less competition.

When David Lereah, chief economist of the National Association of Realtors, addressed the group’s convention in New Orleans in November, he got one of the biggest bursts of applause by predicting there would be fewer Realtors around in a year. Mr. Lereah said in an interview that he expects membership in the trade group to decrease by about 6% to 8% from the record of nearly 1.4 million reached in 2006.

This is what usually happens the first time you visit Zillow.com: You type in your address to check out the Zestimate, an approximation of your home’s market value. It appears in a little pop-up superimposed on a photographic map of your neighborhood. The number might make you smile; it could make you angry.

From the current issue of Fortune Magazine.

Get a “zestimate” here of your house, or your neighbor’s house, or your boss’s house.

Between 1990 and 2002 more than 174 million people escaped poverty in China, about 1.2 million per month. With an estimated $23 billion in Chinese exports in 2005 (out of a total of $713 billion in manufacturing exports), Wal-Mart might well be single-handedly responsible for bringing about 38,000 people out of poverty in China each month, about 460,000 per year.

Act locally, think globally: Shop Wal-Mart.

From Michael Strong, CEO and co-founder of FLOW.

Watch a 5-minute interview of Michael Strong on Bloomberg’s Money and Politics, via Cafe Hayek.

Unions help those they represent by trying to raise wages above what they would otherwise be. To the extent they succeed, they reduce the demand for labor in unionized shops. That means more workers have to find employment in non-unionized shops, pushing down wages there. That’s especially tough on workers with limited skills and education. The sad irony of unions is that they can only improve the lot of their members at the expense of other workers.

~George Mason economist Russ Roberts in today’s LA Times

MP: Empirical evidence shows that industries with the largest union wage premiums are precisely the industries with the largest declines in the employment of unionized workers. The tradeoff then is short-run gains of above-market wages for long-run losses of employment for unionized workers. And the other sad irony is the more successful unions are in the short-run, the worse off they and their industry will be in the long-run. Exhibit A: UAW and GM, Ford and Chrysler.

“I’m proud to be paying taxes in the United States. The only thing is…I could be just as proud for half the the money.”

~Arthur Godfrey