Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading lately:
Understanding Regime Uncertainty
cafehayek.com
“Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, Robert Reich reveals his misunderstanding of regime uncertainty. Unleashing this destructive uncertainty requires more than simply changing in major ways government’s role in the economy. Instead, regime uncertainty is increased by changes that portend into the indefinite future a greater degree of arbitrary government economic intervention.”
N.T. Wright Refuses to Choose
www.robmoll.com
“Former bishop turned professor says he opposed making a choice between his care for the church and his academic pursuits.”
The Biggest Election Myths of 2010
online.wsj.com
“In The Wall Street Journal, Potomac Watch columnist Kimberley Strassel says that Democrats will lose big in the midterm because of the Obama agenda, not because of secret campaign donations or extremist tea partiers.”
A Little Lady Predicts a Big Win
online.wsj.com
“The Republican tide may even reach the Jersey Shore, Peggy Noonan writes.”
Abortion, Conscience, and Doctors « Public Discourse
www.thepublicdiscourse.com
“If people are not prepared to offer legally permitted, efficient, and beneficial care to a patient because it conflicts with their values, they should not be doctors,” declares Julian Savulescu of Oxford University. Savulescu’s position, known as the “incompatibility thesis,” contradicts important statements about the rights of conscientious refusal articulated by the American Medical Association, U.S. federal law, and international law.”
College for Those Who Can’t Learn
www.americanthinker.com
“It is not easy being a connoisseur of educational foibles — just as one is recovering from the latest foolishness, along comes something new, and it’s back to the anti-depressants. The latest installment of Educators Gone Wild is the push to enroll the “intellectually disabled” in college. We are not talking about at…tracting eccentrics; these recruits are youngsters with Down Syndrome, autism, and other disabilities that seriously impede learning. This is college for those stymied by reading and writing.”
Brother, Can You Spare a Trill?
freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com
“Economists Mark J. Kamstra and Robert J. Shiller propose a new tool for government financing: “trills” — i.e., shares in U.S. GDP.”
Warning: Retirement Disaster Ahead
online.wsj.com
“Don’t let the rally in the stock and bond markets fool you. Many Americans are still hurtling towards a retirement train wreck, writes Brett Arends.”
Tax Breaks For The Wealthy Do Boost Economy – Forbes.com
forbes.com
“Congress is biting the hand that feeds long-run economic growth by raising tax rates on the rich.”
Stocks and Bonds Are Bullish on the Economy – BusinessWeek
businessweek.com
“Strong earnings for businesses in a wide range of industries, from CSX to GE to Cargill, may indicate faster economic growth in 2011.”
Democrat Estate Tax Will Trip Next Secretariat: Amity Shlaes
www.bloomberg.com
“The estate tax is one topic getting lost in the dust of the midterm races. That’s a pity. This tax, now quiescent, is set to roar back like a stallion in 2011 if lawmakers don’t rein it in with new legislation.”
Time for Bailout Transparency
online.wsj.com
“In the Wall Street Journal, Matthew Winkler, the editor in chief of Bloomberg News, writes that big banks don’t want you to know which of them went to the Fed for emergency help.”
The Rage Against Citizens United
online.wsj.com
“In The Wall Street Journal, Wonder Land columnist Daniel Henninger examines why Barack Obama gave the Supreme Court a public tongue-lashing.”
Shelby Steele: A Referendum on the Redeemer
online.wsj.com
“Shelby Steele writes in The Wall Street Journal that Barack Obama put the Democrats in the position of forever redeeming a fallen nation rather than leading a great one.”
Stock market aversion? Political preferences and stock market participation
www.sciencedirect.com
“We find that left-wing voters and politicians are less likely to invest in stocks, controlling for income, wealth, education, and other relevant factors. This finding from unique data sets in Finland is robust both at the zip code and at the individual level. A moderate left voter is 17–20% less likely to own stocks than a moderate right voter. The results are consistent with the idea that personal values are a factor in important investment decisions, in this case leading to “stock market aversion.” The results are inconsistent with alternative explanations such as wealth effects, risk aversion, reverse causality, return expectations, or social capital.”
Predicting the Midterm Elections: A Freakonomics Quorum
freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com
“This year’s midterm elections promise to be a bit more eventful than usual, with predictions of seismic change in Congress and in many statehouses, most of it in a blue-to-red direction. But predictions aren’t elections; and even if the predictions hold true, what happens next?”
Assessing the Power of One at the Polls
economix.blogs.nytimes.com
“You’re more likely to be involved in an election-year car crash than to cast a deciding vote, an economist writes.”
www.nypost.com
“With campaign season comes predictable charges that Candidate X favors “tax breaks for corporations that ship US jobs overseas.” It’s a bogus claim.”
QEII, Like QEI, Isn’t Monetary Ease
www.realclearmarkets.com
“As is well known now, the Bernanke Fed is set to begin another round of so-called “quantitative easing” in order to stimulate demand. Unfortunately for Bernanke & Co. simply adding liquidity to an economic system does not promote growth. In fact, the relationship is reversed: it is new demand that stimulates the need for new liquidity, not liquidity that sparks demand.”
The Foreclosure Crisis and the Future of American Communities
online.wsj.com
“In The Wall Street Journal, Business World columnist Holman Jenkins, Jr. says that the attempt by journalists and state attorneys general to cast banks as villains will only make the housing crisis harder to surmount.”
Private Social Security Accounts Are Still a Good Idea
online.wsj.com
“In The Wall Street Journal, William G. Shipman of the Cato Project on Social Security Choice and Peter Ferrara of the Institute for Policy Innovation write that a couple who worked from 1965 to 2009 would have beat the government payout by 75%.”
Fouad Ajami: Karzai and the Scent of U.S. Irresolution
online.wsj.com
“In The Wall Street Journal, Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins University writes that the brutal facts about Afghanistan are these: It is a broken country, a land of banditry, of war of all against all, and the need to get what can be gotten from the strangers.”