Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading lately:

After Autism Scare, Measles Plague Erupts

online.wsj.com

“An outbreak of measles in southwest Wales presents a cautionary tale about the limits of disease control. Measles can quickly cross oceans, setting back progress elsewhere in stopping it.”

20 Feet from Stardom (2013)

www.imdb.com

“Directed by Morgan Neville. With Merry Clayton, Lisa Fischer, Judith Hill, Darlene Love. Backup singers live in a world that lies just beyond the spotlight. Their voices bring harmony to the biggest bands in popular music, but we’ve had no idea who these singers are or what lives they lead, until now.”  I highly recommend this movie. Among other things, the movie chronicles the very deep impact that gospel music has had upon popular music over the course of the past 40-50 years…

A Bombshell in the IRS Scandal

online.wsj.com

“A higher office is implicated, Peggy Noonan writes.” Evidence of a “smoking gun”, presented in sworn testimony which apparently points to the IRS chief counsel…

Trying to attract the young? Churches should change carefully and wisely

www.faithandleadership.com

“When I came back to church after a faith crisis in my early 20s, the first one I attended regularly was a place called Praxis. It was the kind of church where the young, hip pastor hoisted an infant into his arms and said with sincerity, “Dude, I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”” 

Civil Liberties and Security in an Age of Terrorism

www.independent.org

I highly recommend watching this recorded program, which asks (and provides answers to) the following questions: 1) Could the eye-opening reports on the government’s accessing all phone and electronic communications along with the reaction to the Boston Bombing be setting into motion a chain of events of ominous significance? 2) What should Americans be most concerned about?

Magazine’s Startlingly Provocative Cover

www.huffingtonpost.com

Business Week Magazine routinely sexualizes its cover photo, but this week they really went over the top with what HuffPo calls “Bloomberg Businessweek’s Extremely Phallic Cover”…

Milton Friedman Quotes at BrainyQuote.com

www.brainyquote.com

“So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear. That there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.”

U.S. Seen Losing to China as World Leader

online.wsj.com

“A poll shows more people say China will eclipse the U.S. as a world power.”

Should Colleges Charge Engineering Students More?

blogs.wsj.com

“Why does a student majoring in English have to pay the same tuition as an engineering student who has much higher future earning potential?”

The Road to Serfdom

youtube.com

Hayek’s famous tract entitled “The Road to Serfdom” in cartoon form; cartoons shown were originally published in Look Magazine, and were reproduced for this video from a booklet published by the General Motors Corporation in their ‘Thought Starter’ series (no. 118). Soundtrack by Samuel Barber (Adagio for Strings, Opus 11)…

A Jobless Recovery Is a Phony Recovery

online.wsj.com

“In The Wall Street Journal, Mortimer Zuckerman says that more people have left the workforce than got a new job during the recovery—by a factor of nearly three.”  Mr. Zuckerman, who is the chairman and editor in chief of U.S. News & World Report, parses the data for us and finds some very alarming and disturbing facts about the “jobless” recovery…

Race, Politics and the Zimmerman Trial: The left wants to blame black criminality…

online.wsj.com

“In The Wall Street Journal, Jason Riley writes that the left wants to blame black criminality on racial animus and ‘the system,’ but blacks have long been part of running that system.”

Union Letter: Obamacare Will ‘Destroy The Very Health and Wellbeing’ of Workers

blogs.wsj.com

“The leaders of three major U.S. unions say that unless changes are made, the Affordable Care Act will harm “the backbone of the American middle class”.”

The 2016 Disability Insurance Time Bomb

online.wsj.com

“In June, 11 million Americans collected benefits, up from 2.7 million in 1970. The 75-year unfunded liability: $40 trillion.”

Why the President’s ObamaCare Maneuver May Backfire

online.wsj.com

“David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey write that by postponing the employer mandate, President Obama has given millions of Americans the legal standing to sue.”

Why is so much oil carried by train?

www.economist.com

“A DEVASTATING explosion flattened dozens of buildings in Lac-Mégantic, a small town in Quebec, on July 6th. Fifty people are feared to have died when a runaway train carrying crude oil derailed and exploded, creating a fireball that left the town centre looking like a “war zone”.

Pursuing Further Legal Action Against Zimmerman Would Be Tough

online.wsj.com

“The acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of black teenager Trayvon Martin has prompted some calls for further legal action, but there are significant obstacles to pursing the case in the federal or civil courts.”

Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading lately:

Why we shouldn’t raise the minimum wage

www.aei.org

Here’s today’s ECON 101 lesson on the economics of the minimum wage… “Raising the wage will make it more expensive to hire younger and low-skill workers. There are better ways to help the poor.”

Net worthless

www.aei.org

Current US national debt is now $17 trillion – in excess of 100% of US GDP (estimated annual rate as of Q1 2013 for US GDP is $15.98 trillion (source: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=US+Gdp), and also $800 billion higher than it was just 7 months ago (source: http://blog.garven.com/2012/11/07/on-the-current-state-of-americas-public-finances/). Furthermore, quoting from the article cited below,

“In 2012 dollars, household net worth in 2007 was $240,790 per person. Even then, we were looking ahead to high deficits, and the present value of the implicit tax liability facing every American just to cover those deficits was $70,143, with the net of the two values coming to $170,647. At the end of 2012, per capita wealth had climbed back almost to its 2007 value, but the present value of future tax liabilities associated with deficits had climbed all the way to $152,216. So, accounting for federal debt, net wealth had dropped all the way to $62,322 per person.”

Tribal Politics in the 21st Century

www.american.com

I highly recommend this article; for an expanded podcast version, see http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/06/kling_on_the_th.html. “Progressives, conservatives, and libertarians each have a mythology in which they are the heroes and the other tribes are villains. Partisans of these three ideologies even speak different languages.”

The President’s Broken Window Fallacy: Carbon Policies and Jobs

american.com

Here’s a shoutout to Frédéric Bastiat, the 19th century French political economist who is famous for having penned the influential “Parable of the Broken Window” (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window)… “It is time to expose the flawed jobs reasoning behind President Obama’s new carbon plan.”

The $4.3 Million Bunch At Thunderbird

poetsandquants.com

“Pay for just ten Thunderbird profs totals $4.3 million a year”  This is impressive considering that according to a recent WSJ article (cf. http://on.wsj.com/132S1nQ), the Thunderbird Global School of Management “… is selling its campus to a for-profit college operator as part of a last-ditch effort to bolster its finances as more people question the value of an M.B.A.” Another article (cf. http://poetsandquants.com/2013/04/06/b-schools-that-graduate-jobless-mbas/) notes that the Thunderbird Global School of Management also has one of the worst full-time MBA placement records of 2012 with 76.1% of the graduating class without jobs at graduation…

Big Government Implodes—and ObamaCare’s Failures Aren’t the Only Sign

online.wsj.com

“Mark July 3, 2013, as the day Big Government finally imploded… In The Wall Street Journal, Wonder Land columnist Daniel Henninger writes that ObamaCare’s failures are not the only sign of a great public crack-up.”

Replace the IRS with the Honor System

www.americanthinker.com

Since there already is an Obamacare honor system in place, in that the administration has announced to take enrollees at their word in self-reporting their income and insurance status (see “Obamacare honor system: Admin will take enrollees’ word on income, insurance status” @ http://bit.ly/18IPSSk and “Health insurance marketplaces will not be required to verify consumer claims” at http://wapo.st/17YorEI), why stop there?

What Austerity Looks Like in 2013: Taxes Up 14%, Spending Down 4%

reason.com

“The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has run the numbers for the first nine months of fiscal year 2013, which started on October 1, 2012. The results?”

Walmart Threatens To Pull Out Of D.C. Over ‘Living Wage’

jobs.aol.com

“City council forced to decide: are no jobs better than bad jobs?”

Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading and videos that I have been viewing lately:

NSA Snooping and the Conservative Precautionary Principle

www.libertarianism.org

“Conservatives use the precautionary principle to justify domestic spying just as the left uses it to justify environmentalism. Neither is convincing.”

Noonan: Privacy Isn’t All We’re Losing

online.wsj.com

“The surveillance state threatens Americans’ love of country, Peggy Noonan argues.”

IRS taxing of tanning beds and other Obamacare absurdities

www.washingtonpost.com

“The White House has scuttled the idea of individual conscience.”

Pop Stars And The Rise Of Inequality In America, In 2 Graphs

www.npr.org

“What ticket sales tell us about what’s driving the gap between the 1 percent and everybody else.”

How the NSA Spies on Americans

www.cato.org

“A leaked (and secret) court order and other documents reveal that the National Security Agency has been collecting phone records on millions of Americans for months at a time, spying on e-mail communications with the knowledge of large Internet providers and collecting a vast catalog of Americans’ credit card transactions. Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, discusses the revelations.”

Germans accuse U.S. of Stasi tactics before Obama visit

www.reuters.com

“German outrage over a U.S. Internet spying program has broken out ahead of a visit by Barack Obama, with ministers demanding the president provide a full explanation…”

The Grumpy Economist: Energy Idiocy

johnhcochrane.blogspot.com

University of Chicago finance professor John Cochrane asks, “What is it about energy that send all sides of the political spectrum into spasms of babbling idiocy?”

The Free Market Is a Beautiful Thing

reason.com

Trade and cooperation are superior to force and command.

No ordinary politician

www.economist.com

“Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s prime minister from 1979 to 1990, died on April 8th at the age of 87. We assess her legacy to Britain and the world.” I was fascinated to learn, among other things, that the “Iron Lady” was a fan of the following Abraham Lincoln quote, “You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer.”

The disposable academic

www.economist.com

Fascinating article from the Economist about the economics of the PhD degree… Here’s an excerpt, “In a recent book, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, an academic and a journalist, report that America produced more than 100,000 doctoral degrees between 2005 and 2009. In the same period there were just 16,000 new professorships.”

The President’s Priorities

online.wsj.com

The Wall Street Journal reports that under the new White House budget public debt in 2014 will hit 78.2% of the economy. This reported 78.2% number represents more than a doubling since 2007 in the size of federal debt held by the public as a percent of GDP.

Google Lets Users Plan ‘Digital Afterlife’ By Naming Heirs

blogs.wsj.com

Google on Wednesday became one of the first major Internet companies to put control of data after death directly into the hands of its users.

Is Obamacare ‘the bullet to the temple’?

money.msn.com

Bernie Marcus, who co-founded Home Depot in 1979, says the massive health care insurance overhaul will ‘kill off small business.’

When the Government Plays Favorites

reason.com

Government continues to threaten our future while claiming to help us.

Obama’s Budget: Spending Too High, But Bush Was Worse

www.cato.org

The sooner people understand that overspending it is a deep and chronic disease with bipartisan roots, the sooner we can start finding a lasting cure.

How Much Does Your Name Matter? A New Freakonomics Radio Podcast

www.freakonomics.com

“The gist: a kid’s name can tell us something about his parents — their race, social standing, even their politics. But is your name really your destiny?” (spoiler alert: the “best” social scientific response to this question is “probably not”, although filmmaker Morgan Spurlock leans in favor of the affirmative…)…

MSNBC Host Melissa Harris-Perry » All Your Kids Belong To Us

MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry considers the unborn child a “thing” which takes a “lot of money” to “turn into a human,” costing thousands of dollars to care for each year of his/her life. Now it appears that Harris-Perry thinks that, after they’re born, children fundamentally belong to the state. Narrating a new MSNBC “Lean Forward” spot, the Tulane professor laments that we in America “haven’t had a very collective notion that these are our children.” “[W]e have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to their communities,” Harris-Perry argued.

Your Wealth is Not Yours

capitalistpig.com

Expected to be released this week, President Obama’s budget will limit how much individuals can keep in 401(k)s, IRAs and other retirement accounts.

The Sequester: Absolutely everything you could possibly need to know, in one FAQ

washingtonpost.com

I heard an interesting sequestration story over lunch today. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, half of the $85.4 billion in “cuts” for 2013 (i.e., $42.7 billion) apparently comes out of what had been budgeted for the Department of Defense for the current fiscal year. In percentage terms, this $42.7 billion cut represents a 7.9% cut in DOD’s 2013 budget (source: http://wapo.st/15vLbrI). Anyway, a colleague mentioned that at one of the service academies, the salaries of virtually ALL civilian faculty have been cut by 20%, whereas the salaries of military faculty at the same institution have remained untouched… I can’t help but wonder how that decision (i.e., sparing faculty with military appointments while really putting it to the civilian faculty) was made – probably NOT by a civilian administrator…

It Isn’t A Question Of If Obamacare “Collapses”

www.firstthings.com

“I don’t think there is a danger that Obamacare will collapse. It is a certainty. The question is what Obamacare collapses into.”

A Slick Marketing Campaign Won’t Save ObamaCare

news.investors.com

The White House recently released details about how it plans to market ObamaCare to the uninsured. It reveals most don’t want what they’re being forced to buy.

To Sign Up For Obamacare, Start Filling Out The Forms Now (And Hire A Good Accountant)

www.forbes.com

Want to apply for Obamacare this fall? Start the paperwork now. The Obama Administration quietly released a draft copy of its “single streamlined application” for Obamacare. This is the form that the government will use to certify eligibility for the program’s subsidies. The on-line version of that…

New York Times Magazine article entitled “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits”. The app includes a copy of Friedman’s essay, along with videos featuring comments and interpretations of Friedman by various Baylor faculty, including yours truly :-). The Social Responsibility of Business itunes.apple.com]]>

My Baylor colleague Blaine McCormick recently produced a multimedia media iPad/iPhone app based upon Milton Friedman’s famous 1970 New York Times Magazine article entitled “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits”. The app includes a copy of Friedman’s essay, along with videos featuring comments and interpretations of Friedman by various Baylor faculty, including yours truly :-).

The Social Responsibility of Business

itunes.apple.com

Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading lately:

When Hope Tramples Truth

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com

“It is easy to trace disasters like the Euro and the Arab Spring to the bursts of unfounded optimism that gave rise to them. So why is pessimism so often ignored?”

Unfit for Work: The startling rise of disability in America

npr.org

“In the past three decades, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed. The rise has come even as medical advances have allowed many more people to remain on the job and new laws have banned workplace discrimination against the disabled.” The other “startling” fact from this NPR article is that there apparently exists a fairly lucrative “business opportunity” for firms which help state governments move “disabled” people from state welfare over to federal disability status. For example, one such company asked for $2,300 per person from the state of Missouri for effectively converting its state welfare recipients into Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) claimants. In other words, substantial transactions costs are apparently being paid by state taxpayers to transfer the costs of state welfare programs over to federal taxpayers…

Health Insurers Warn on Premiums

online.wsj.com

Here’s a very interesting (ungated) Wall Street Journal article concerning some of the “unintended” consequences of Obamacare…”Health insurers are privately warning brokers that premiums for many individuals and small businesses could increase sharply next year because of the health-care overhaul law, with the nation’s biggest firm projecting that rates could more than double for some consumers buying their own plans.”

Memo to Staff: Take More Risks

online.wsj.com

“Want to succeed? Embrace failure…. Extended Stay CEO Jim Donald said employees were afraid of taking risks. So he is handing out “Get Out of Jail, Free” cards to 9,000 employees. They call in the card when they take a big risk on behalf of the company – no questions asked.

New York’s Coolest New Museum: MoMath

bloomberg.com

“Bloomberg’s Tom Keene goes to MoMath, the first math museum in the United States.”

Preach Like Your Faith Depends on It – 10 Big Ideas

ideas.time.com

“They can be as huge as a new constitution or as tiny as a medical microchip. In this special report, TIME explores innovations that are changing the way we work, live, pray and play.”

Jeremy Lott on the Media’s Pope-O-Rama

www.researchonreligion.org

“How well did the popular media do in covering the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, the Conclave of Cardinals, and the election of Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope Francis I?”

Failing College

reason.com

“Why are we screwing up the world’s best higher education system?” Here’s the answer in a nutshell, “Students arrive on campus underqualified, courtesy of an American public school system that has flatlined in quality while tripling its per-student cost. They do less academic work yet receive better grades than their parents did. And their post-college job prospects are dim, with unemployment rates for recent grads hovering at 12 percent.”

The America that works

www.economist.com

Quoting from The Economist, “This is the America that China’s leaders laugh at, and the rest of the democratic world despairs of. Its debt is rising, its population is ageing in a budget-threatening way, its schools are mediocre by international standards, its infrastructure rickety, its regulations dense, its tax code byzantine, its immigration system hare-brained—and it has fallen from first position in the World Economic Forum’s competitiveness rankings to seventh in just four years.”

The Doctor Will Not See You Now. He’s Clocked Out

online.wsj.com

“In The Wall Street Journal, Scott Gottlieb writes that ObamaCare is pushing physicians into becoming hospital employees and the results aren’t encouraging.”

The New Power of Memory

online.wsj.com

“Sharp recall skills have proven themselves key to future success, scientists have found. A look at what some call mental time travel.”

Soda Ban Ruling a Devastating Defeat for Mayor Bloomberg

dailycaller.com

“The judge who struck down Mayor Bloomberg’s nanny state soda ban issued a sweeping opinion that does everything but hand Mayor Poppins his umbrella and carpetbag.”

Medicaid Expansion Too Good to Be True

www.cato.org

“If implemented, ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion will cost Michigan taxpayers $2.25 billion over the next 10 years. Fortunately, legislators can still defend state taxpayers by saying “No.””

Intrade, R.I.P.

www.aei-ideas.org

“From the Intrade website: “With sincere regret we must inform you that due to circumstances recently discovered we must immediately cease trading activity www.intrade.com.””

Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading lately:

Cutting Government Will Boost the Economy

reason.com

“Why Keynesianism is still wrong.”

Colleges Bleeding Students to Buy Golden Parachutes for Administrators

Instapundit

“College administrators have found an interesting new way to strike it rich: quitting their jobs.” Quoting from this article on the high cost of college, “People blame faculty, but most of the increase in cost has come from administrative bloat.” The various “Golden Parachute” examples given by NYU during recent years are quite impressive indeed!

Stop Hedging Around

online.wsj.com

“Hedge funds have amassed a record size of assets. If only their results were as impressive.” Brett Arends notes that given the fees typically charged by hedge funds (2% of the value of assets under management plus 20% of any profits), such funds would have to beat the market by 50 percent a year, every year, just to match a low-cost portfolio of stocks and bonds.

College: Where Free Speech Goes to Die

www.hoover.org

“Thanks to unconstitutional university speech codes, students are losing their intellectual edge.”

Budget Politics

townhall.com

Hoover Institution economist extraordinaire Thomas Sowell opines on the political economy of sequestration… He poses a particularly interesting thought experiment which we now see being played out in spades: “Imagine a government agency with only two tasks: (1) building statues of Benedict Arnold and (2) providing life-saving medications to children. If this agency’s budget were cut, what would it do? The answer, of course, is that it would cut back on the medications for children. Why? Because that would be what was most likely to get the budget cuts restored. If they cut back on building statues of Benedict Arnold, people might ask why they were building statues of Benedict Arnold in the first place.”

Edith Widder: How we found the giant squid

www.ted.com

“Humankind has been looking for the giant squid since we first started taking pictures underwater. But the elusive deep-sea predator could never be caught on film. Oceanographer and inventor Edith Widder shares the key insight — and the teamwork — that helped to capture the giant squid.”

Hugo Chávez

online.wsj.com

“The lesson is to beware the rule of charismatic demagogues.”

Actually, the real Dow is still 11% below its record

buzz.money.cnn.com

“In inflation adjusted terms, the Dow is still 11% below its all-time high set in January 2000.”

Leigh Steinberg on Sports, Agents, and Athletes

www.econtalk.org

Leigh Steinberg is the legendary sports agent depicted in the film “Jerry Maguire”. He writes a regular column on forbes.com, and I recommend not only listening to this podcast but also reading his article “The Death of the NFL” at http://onforb.es/13El3qM. Here’s a synopsis of this very worthwhile and informative podcast: “Leigh Steinberg, legendary sports agent, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about his career as a sports agent. He discusses the challenges of building a clientele, how sports agents spend their time, strategies for building a brand as an athlete, and safety issues currently affecting the National Football League.”

Shining like the Sun

www.patheos.com

I highly recommend UT-Austin sociologist Mark Regnerus’ “… non-sociological compilation of thoughts on Lent, magnanimity, and dying.”

Republicans and Their Faulty Moral Arithmetic

online.wsj.com

AEI president Art Brooks argues that an important reason why conservatives find themselves continually losing at the ballot box is because they’re using a faulty moral arithmetic…

Running on Empty

online.wsj.com

“John H. Cochrane reviews The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do About It by Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig.” This book review by University of Chicago finance professor John Cochrane provides the best “layman’s” explanation that I have seen concerning how regulatory complicity (by sanctioning extraordinarily high levels of debt relative to equity coupled with providing bailouts for so-called “Too Big to Fail” (TBTF) banks) not only set the stage for the GFC (global financial crisis) of 2008, but also sets the stage for future financial crises by effectively codifying TBTF and bailouts (compliments of the so-called “Dodd-Frank” financial reform law) as “essential” parts of the architecture of the US financial system…

Unfortunately, the rest of the developed world seems to be following the US lead in rendering financial markets even more susceptible to financial crises going forward by similarly designating TBTF firms as “systemically important financial institutions” (SIFI) for which bailouts are implicitly promised. No sane person would ever design a system of regulation like this, which effectively rewards large financial institutions for rolling the dice with the house’s (taxpayer) money…

The Minimum Wage Harms the Most Vulnerable

reason.com

“How long will progressives get away with pretending to care about the poor?” Abolish the minimum wage—for the sake of the poor.

Obama Is Playing a New Game

online.wsj.com

“He seems to think the way to win is by trying not to make a deal, Peggy Noonan writes.”

In Cuts, a Stroll Through Obscure Parts of Budget

online.wsj.com

“The ‘sequester’ reductions range from $6 million in the Leaking Underground Storage Tank Trust to $1 million to wool manufacturers in a homeland-security program.” Still scratching my head over the following sentence from this article: “Payments to wool manufacturers, a $15 million Department of Homeland Security program, would be cut by $1 million”. To be sure, border agents on the Canadian border might require heavy wool coats, but $15 million worth?

Imagining a Post-Bundle TV World

online.wsj.com

As more consumers cut the cord, cable-TV executives are considering the end of the bundle system. That may allow customers flexibility in choosing channels, rather than subscribing to large packages.” My wife and I cut the cord back in November 2011. By dropping Time Warner’s so-called “Triple Play” service (consisting of digital cable, digital phone, and internet) and only subscribing to Time Warner’s RoadRunner Internet service, our monthly bill is now more than $100 lighter than it used to be. We still have home phone service, but it’s free and our telecom carrier is Google (see http://bit.ly/uqjPub). I purchased a “rabbit ear” style antenna from Radio Shack for $11 and we now receive all the local network affiliates plus various other channels in HD for free, although we mostly watch programs on Hulu Plus ($8 per month) and occasionally rent movies from Amazon. It’s amazing that it has taken the cable companies this long to “unbundle” – their customers have been doing their own “homemade” unbundling for some time now…

Population Decline and the Birth Dearth

www.thepublicdiscourse.com

Jonathan Last’s new book attributes population decline and the birth dearth to two trends that started in the Enlightenment era—first, an effort to limit death; second, an effort to control birth. Both trends are guided by a desire to control nature. Quoting from this fascinating article, “All Western countries have birthrates below the replacement rates, suggesting that soon all countries will experience a graying of, and a decline in, population.”

Wal-Mart’s Sales Problem—And America’s

online.wsj.com

The left loves to see the retailer suffer, but does its bad February herald another recession? Apparently the Jan. 1 expiration of the payroll-tax cut on Jan. 1 (which lowered most worker’s net pay by 2 percent) was a contributing factor, as was the decision by the IRS to delay the start of its tax refunds to Jan. 31 from Jan. 17.

Varoufakis on Valve, Spontaneous Order, and the European Crisis

www.econtalk.org

This is one of the most intriguing EconTalk podcasts I have ever listened to. I particularly like his title as “economist-in-residence” at a gaming company called Valve Software (cf. http://www.valvesoftware.com/). Here’s the synopsis from econtalk.org:

“Yanis Varoufakis of the University of Athens, the University of Texas, and the economist-in-residence at Valve Software talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the unusual structure of the workplace at Valve. Valve, a software company that creates online video games, has no hierarchy or bosses. Teams of software designers join spontaneously to create and ship video games without any top-down supervision. Varoufakis discusses the economics of this Hayekian workplace and how it actually functions alongside Steam–an open gaming platform created by Valve. The conversation concludes with a discussion of the economic crisis in Europe. ”

Obama’s sequester deal-changer

www.washingtonpost.com

“The president and his staff have been wrong about how the sequester came about.”

Here’s a list of articles that I have been reading lately:

The Critics Are Wrong About the Future of Free-Market Health Care Reform

www.forbes.com

“Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Avik Roy outline a market-based plan for entitlement reform and universal coverage that builds on a reformed version of Obamacare’s subsidized insurance exchanges.” In their “all-purpose rebuttal” to Matthew Yglesias, Paul Krugman, et al., Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Avik Roy provide a way forward which has as its end result “… a health-care system that resembles a slightly less-regulated version of Switzerland’s.”

Voters Grow Weary of Washington’s Drama

professional.wsj.com

No kidding (about growing weary). Consider the following quote from this article, “After two years of creating and then resolving a series of budget showdowns, lawmakers are losing the power to summon concern—or even much interest—among the public, voters here say. “It just happens so often, it’s white noise to me,” said Eric Jones, general manager and partner of the Glenn Jones Ford dealer in Casa Grande…”

Noonan: Government by Freakout

online.wsj.com

“Obama’s scare tactics aren’t much of a long-term strategy, argues Peggy Noonan.” This is what it feels like these days – it seems like we are averaging at least one major fiscal crisis per month…

ObamaCare and the ’29ers’

online.wsj.com

“The Wall Street Journal reports how the Affordable Care Act’s new mandates are already reducing full-time employment.” Here’s a case study of the law of unintended consequences at work!

The Hollywood Tax Story They Won’t Tell at the Oscars

online.wsj.com

“In The Wall Street Journal’s Cross Country column, Glenn Harlan Reynolds writes that it’s easy to demand higher levies on the ‘rich’ when your own industry gets $1.5 billion in government handouts.” I am a big fan of the author of this article, Glenn Reynolds who blogs at Instapundit and is a law professor at University of Tennessee – check out this week’s Econtalk episode entitled “Glenn Reynolds on Politics, the Constitution, and Technology” @ http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/02/glenn_reynolds.html!

Generational Theft Needs to Be Arrested

“In The Wall Street Journal, Geoffrey Canada, Stanley Druckenmiller and Kevin Warsh write that a Democrat, an independent and a Republican can agree—government spending levels are unsustainable.”

The Shaky Science Behind Obama’s Universal Pre-K

www.bloomberg.com

AEI scholar Charles Murray and his assessment of the social science behind the Obama Administration’s universal Pre-K policy proposal…

Bad history, worse policy: How a false narrative about the financial crisis led to the Dodd-Frank Act

www.aei.org

At an event on Tuesday, panelists joined AEI’s Peter Wallison and Alex Pollock to discuss Wallison’s new book “Bad History, Worse Policy: How a False Narrative about the Financial Crisis Led to the Dodd-Frank Act” (AEI Press, January 2013). This panel discussion from an American Enterprise Institute event that occurred last week provides insightful analysis of the so-called Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 (AKA “Dodd-Frank”). The bad news is that Dodd–Frank effectively codifies notions of too-big-too-fail (“TBTF”) and bailouts into the foundations of our financial system.

Obamacare: Nothing to Brag About

www.cato.org

“The president’s health-care law increasingly does less and costs more.”

U.S. CEO to France: “How Stupid Do You Think We Are?”

blogs.wsj.com

“Instead of investing in France, the U.S. tire maker Titan is “going to buy a Chinese tire company or an Indian one, pay less than one Euro per hour and ship all the tires France needs,” its CEO said.” This is priceless – particularly the copy of the actual letter sent by Titan’s CEO to French industry minister Arnaud Montebourg that is attached to this article – well worth reading!

How Scientists Sank the U-Boat

online.wsj.com

“Marc Levinson reviews Stephen Budiansky’s Blackett’s War: The Men Who Defeated the Nazi U-Boats and Brought Science to the Art of Warfare.” This is a fascinating book review which describes, among other things, how WW II led to the development of operations research (a field which involves the application of statistical analysis to decision-making) and related fields such as game theory. To this day, these disciplines profoundly affect how decisions are made and strategies formulated, not only in the military but also myriad other public and private sector settings. I might have to read this book (that is, after I finish reading Andrew Roberts’ superb book about WWII entitled “The Storm of War” (cf. http://amzn.to/YjnGec)…

The Minority Youth Unemployment Act

online.wsj.com

“The Wall Street Journal says in an editorial that a higher minimum wage will most hurt President Obama’s most loyal supporters.” This article calls to mind the famous Thomas Huxley quote, “The great tragedy of Science: the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact” (the “beautiful hypothesis” here being the claim made by the Obama administration that “…modestly raising the minimum wage increases earnings and reduces poverty without measurably reducing employment”).

I was impressed that this article references the highly cited 2006 monograph by Neumark and Wascher which looks at more than 100 (mostly peer reviewed) academic studies on the minimum wage and notes that the vast majority (85%) of these studies “…find a negative employment effect on low-skilled workers.” The article goes on to note, among other things, that “…the minimum wage has nothing to do with poverty or unemployment. It’s a political play to reward unions and box in Republicans. The minimum wage polls well because Americans naturally want everyone to make more money, and the damage in foregone jobs isn’t obvious.”

The Art and Politics of ‘Zero Dark Thirty’

online.wsj.com

“In The Wall Street Journal, Matthew Kaminski interviews the man behind the film about the hunt for bin Laden talks about how he combined facts with imagination and calls his Senate critics ‘intellectually dishonest.'”

While I am interested in a fairly wide variety of public policy issues, my knowledge about many (perhaps most?) things tends to be somewhat superficial, and locavorism is no exception. What little I do know about locavorism comes primarily from a recent article written by a pair of agricultural economists entitled “The Locavore’s Dilemma: Why Pineapples Shouldn’t Be Grown in North Dakota” (available from http://bit.ly/egKUki) and from the following 3 “EconTalk” (fairly recent) podcasts which address various aspects of locavorism:

1. “David Owen on the Environment, Unintended Consequences, and The Conundrum” (@ http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/02/david_owen_on_t.html),
2. “Cowen on Food” (@ http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/04/cowen_on_food.html), and
3. “Lisa Turner on Organic Farming” (@ http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/12/lisa_turner_on.html ).

These podcasts (and article) provide examples concerning how eating local food can at times be environmentally better (and tastier :-)) than non-local food. They also enumerate myriad examples in which this is clearly not the case – i.e., lots of times locavorism can be environmentally worse than eating non-local food. I guess it all “depends”…

P.S.: This posting came about as a result of a conversation that I had recently had about locavorism with a friend who reminded me of the famous 1st episode of Portlandia located at in which locavores Peter and Nance ask their waitress about the chicken (named “Colin”)…