Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading today (organized by topic):

Foreign Policy

• Obama Contra Niebuhr, by Joseph Loconte

“Supporters of President Obama’s ‘moral realism’ are unaware of many elements of Reinhold Niebuhr’s political theology.“

Health Care Reform

• The Health Lady Has Yet to Sing, by Kim Strassel

“ObamaCare is still no sure thing.”

• The High Cost of No Price, by Veronique de Rugy

“Economists have shown that if a good’s price is zero or decreasing, then the demand for this good will likely increase. In 2008, consumers were only directly responsible for 11.9 percent of total national healthcare expenditures, down from 43 percent in 1965, according to new data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This means that someone other than consumers pays roughly 88 percent of all healthcare costs, giving consumers little incentive to mind costs and much incentive to over-consume.”

Politics

• Slug the Obama Story ‘Disconnect’, by Peggy Noonan

“He and the public are on different pages, if not in different books.”

• One year out: President Obama’s fall, by Charlkes Krauthammer

“What went wrong? A year ago, he was king of the world. Now President Obama’s approval rating, according to CBS, has dropped to 46 percent — and his disapproval rating is the highest ever recorded by Gallup at the beginning of an (elected) president’s second year.”

Public Policy

• The Green Con Job, by Dustin Chambers and Dan Ervin

“The U.S. economy is sensitive to high energy prices. An aggressive push toward green power would result in the net loss of millions of jobs. There is a better way forward.“

Terrorism

• Don’t panic. Fear is al-Qaeda’s real goal, by Fareed Zakaria

“In responding to the attempted bombing of an airliner on Christmas Day, Sen. Dianne Feinstein voiced the feelings of many when she said that to prevent such situations, “I’d rather overreact than underreact.” This appears to be the consensus view in Washington, but it is quite wrong. The purpose of terrorism is to provoke an overreaction.”

Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading today (organized by topic):

Economics

• Secrets of the Economist’s Trade: First, Purchase a Piggy Bank, by Justin Lahart

“Economists are often cheapskates.”

The Economy

• Uncertainty and the Slow Recovery, by Gary Becker, Stephen Davis, and Kevin Murphy

“A recession is a terrible time to make major changes in the economic rules of the game.”

Financial Crisis

• Error vs. Fraud, by Alex Pollock

“How do groups of intelligent, sophisticated bankers, investors, borrowers, entrepreneurs, and traders find themselves caught together in the recurring bubbles and busts?“

Highly Recommended

• Lowlights of a Downer Year: Dave Barry on the money, madness and misery of 2009

“It was a year of Hope — at first in the sense of “I feel hopeful!” and later in the sense of “I hope this year ends soon!””

Public Policy

• Prohibition: A Cautionary Tale, by Thomas Fleming

“America’s experiment with banning alcohol created problems that persist to this day.”

Terrorism

• Intelligence Is a Terrible Thing to Waste, by Gordon Crovitz

“President Obama doesn’t need an investigation to figure out how Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab got on a Detroit-bound plane.”

Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading today (organized by topic):

Highly Recommended

• Look Ahead With Stoicism—and Optimism, by Peggy Noonan

“While so many of our institutions have failed, we can repair them. The first step is to take personal responsibility.”

• Welcoming 2010, from the Boston Globe’s “Big Picture” blogsite

“People all around the world gathered in groups large and small last night to usher out the previous year, and welcome the arrival of 2010. Under a rare New Year’s Eve Blue Moon, crowds watched fireworks, cheered, made resolutions, and counted down to midnight. 2010 is the year of the Tiger in the Chinese zodiac, signifying a year of bravery and courage. Collected here are some photographs of people across the earth as they welcomed the new year in many different ways. (38 photos total)”

Public Policy

• The God That Fails, by David Brooks

“It would be nice if we reacted to the inevitable failures of centralized agencies with resiliency instead of rabid denunciation and cynicism.”

• Goodbye, Estate Tax (for now), by Greg Mankiw

“The estate tax is now gone, one of the goals of President Bush.  But under current law, it will come back next year.”

• Viral video: Unions, liberals caused downfall of Detroit, by Mark Smith (Detroit Free Press)

Terrorism

• A terrorist war Obama has denied, by Charles Krauthammer

“Janet Napolitano — former Arizona governor, now overmatched secretary of homeland security — will forever be remembered for having said of the attempt to bring down an airliner over Detroit: “The system worked.” The attacker’s concerned father had warned U.S. authorities about his son’s jihadist tendencies. The would-be bomber paid cash and checked no luggage on a transoceanic flight. He was nonetheless allowed to fly, and would have killed 288 people in the air alone, save for a faulty detonator and quick actions by a few passengers.”

Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading today (organized by topic):

Financial Crisis

• The Cloning of Fannie and Freddie, by Jonathan Koppell

“It’s safer to break up the biggest banks than have the feds guarantee them against failure.”

• The Price for Fannie and Freddie Keeps Going Up, by Peter Wallison

“Barney Frank’s decision to ‘roll the dice’ on subsidized housing is becoming an epic disaster for taxpayers.”

Foreign Policy

• A Cold-Blooded Foreign Policy, by Fouad Ajami

“No despot fears the president, and no demonstrator in Tehran expects him to ride to the rescue.”

Health Care Reform

• Thoughts on Health Care Reform, by Steve Lansburg

“…insurance is not part of the solution; it’s part of the problem.”

• Impermissible Ratemaking in Health-Insurance Reform: Why the Reid Bill is Unconstitutional, by Richard Epstein

“At this point, there is a near mathematical certainty that the scheme of health insurance market regulation contemplated by the Reid bill will reduce the risk-adjusted rate of return below the level needed to keep these firms in the individual and small-group health-insurance markets. I am not aware of a single provision in the Reid Bill that looks to ensuring a minimum rate of return. And there are countless provisions in the bill that impose new obligations to cover services while eliminating the revenue sources to deal with them. It is just this combination of regulatory programs that leads the CBO to treat private health insurance issuers as part of a federal program—as though they have been subject to de facto nationalization.”

• Once Patients Pay, Health Costs Will Fall

“The push to reform the system is going in exactly the wrong direction. Instead of minimizing patient involvement in payment for treatment, Washington should be seeking to increase patients’ role.”

Public Policy

• Are Taxes the Root of Unhappiness?, by Allysia Finley

“States with the highest taxes also rank as the unhappiest.”

Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading today (organized by topic):

Culture

• The Miser versus the Entrepreneur, by Jay Richards

“Why is Ayn Rand so popular today?”

Economics

• Happy 99th Birthday, Ronald Coase, by Steve Landsburg
• Keynes vs. Hayek: Late Economists’ Hip-Hop Legacy

Finance

• Two Decades Later: Nikkei and Lessons from the Fall, by Vaclav Smil

“Twenty years ago this week, Japan’s Nikkei index reached its historic peak of 38,916. There are lessons from the fall for America and the world.”

Foreign Policy

• 2009: The year of living fecklessly, by Charles Krauthammer

“On Tuesday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad did not just reject President Obama’s latest feckless floating nuclear deadline. He spat on it, declaring that Iran “will continue resisting” until the United States has gotten rid of its 8,000 nuclear warheads.”

Health Care Reform

• The Real Consequences of Health Insurance Overhaul, by Scott Harrington

“Why we will see increased health insurance costs and a radical shift toward expanded government control of health insurance and medical care.

Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading today (organized by topic):

Art, Music, and Culture

• The High Cost of Ignoring Beauty, by Roger Scruton

“Architecture clearly illustrates the social, environmental, economic, and aesthetic costs of ignoring beauty. We are being torn out of ourselves by the loud gestures of people who want to seize our attention but give nothing in return.“

Health Care Reform

• Senate Preparing for Cloture on Health Care, by Megan McArdle
• We Already Know Why Healthcare Overhaul Will Fail, by John Calfee

“The healthcare overhaul is shaping up as the highest-risk legislation in modern times.“

Highly Recommended

• The decade in news photographs, from the Boston Globe’s “Big Picture” blogsite

“Call it what you will, “the noughties”, “the two-thousands” or something else, the first decade of the 21st century (2000-2009) is now over. Looking back on the past ten years through news photographs, it becomes clear that it was a dramatic, often brutal decade. Natural disasters, terrorist attacks and wars were by far the most dominant theme. Ten years ago, Bill Clinton was ending his final term in office, very few had ever heard of Osama bin Laden, the Taliban ruled Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein still ruled Iraq – all that and much more has changed in the intervening time. It’s really an impossible task to sum up ten years in a handful of photographs, but below is my best attempt at a look back at the last decade – feel free to let me know what I missed in the comments below. (50 photos total)”

Religion

• Christianity Caused the Crash?, by Greg Forster

“A screaming headline in the Atlantic magazine blames Christianity for the recent economic turmoil. In fact, changing economic attitudes among Christians did contribute to the problem—just not in the way the Atlantic believes.“