What I’m Reading — December 23^rd

Richard Epstein: Harry Reid Turns Insurance Into a Public Utility. “The argument seems to be that price controls alone can force out the waste and inefficiency that are posited to be the hallmark of private markets. By this twisted logic, rent control is the perfect path to efficient competitive markets.”
Creating Incentives for Learning. “Mr. Toby’s main proposal, then, is to require good grades and test scores from those seeking federal student loans. This requirement, he believes, would improve incentives for academic performance and mitigate the inevitable trade-off between widening access to college and maintaining educational standards.”
Exactly Why the Founders Divided the Legislative Branch. E.J. Dionne argues against checks and balances: “In a normal democracy, such majorities would work their will, a law would pass, and champagne corks would pop. But everyone must get it through their heads that thanks to the bizarre habits of the Senate, we are no longer a normal democracy.”
Debunking Conspiracy Theories. “Today no conspiracist publication or Web site wants for the outward flourishes of scholarship. The footnotes are compendious, the sources are seemingly authoritative. It is only when you get in amongst them that you discover what the footnotes actually refer to.”

Inappropriate and Unacceptable Language. “As a society, we strive to eradicate moral language, hoping to eliminate the intolerance that often accompanies it. But intolerance has not been eliminated, merely thrust underground.”
Dealing with America’s fiscal hole | The Economist “[I]gnoring the future is also costly. The problem is not the deficits in the next couple of years, but in the years that follow. Uncertainty over how taxes may be raised to shrink deficits may already be weighing on business confidence. Worries about inflation or default could start to push up interest rates. Eventually, private investment will be crowded out.”
East and West Berlin. “West Berlin was full of bright colors, from shop windows and pennants flying on buildings, to the clothes worn by Berliners on the street. All of the buildings in East Berlin were gray and dirty. Some were still unoccupied and had bullet holes; they had never been repaired or renovated after the end of World War II. West Berlin was full of bright, sparkling vistas and shops filled with consumer goods of all kinds. East Berlin was dark and dingy.”

What I’m Reading — November 8^th

Unintended Consequences of Credit Card ‘Reform.’ “‘We basically socialized the bearing of the risk,’ said Ken Clayton, managing director of card policy for the American Bankers Association, a trade group. ‘That’s why good customers sometimes have to bear the cost of the risk that others pose.’”
Ponnuru on Repositioning Conservatism. “The [GOP] problem has instead been that voters have not thought Republicans of any stripe had answers to their most pressing concerns. Addressing those concerns, rather than repositioning itself along the ideological spectrum, is the party’s main challenge.”
Big Ben on Twitter

What I’m Reading — October 30^th

The Rise of English as a Universal Language. John McWhorter wonders if English will become the world’s lingua franca.
Is E-mail Corrupting Us?
How To Write Badly Well

What I’m Reading — October 26^th

Robert Samuelson on the Public Option. “The promise of the public plan is a mirage. Its political brilliance is to use free-market rhetoric (more ‘choice’ and ‘competition’) to expand government power.”
Unlearning the Lessons of State Health Reforms. “Despite these state-level failures, President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats are pushing forward a slate of similar reforms. Unlike most high-school science fair participants, they seem unaware that the point of doing experiments is to identify what actually works. Instead, they’ve identified what doesn’t—and decided to do it again.”
Just How Relevant Is Political Science?

What I’m Reading — October 11^th

The New Yorker Explores What ‘Management Science’ Really Is.
How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect. “When those patterns break down — as when a hiker stumbles across an easy chair sitting deep in the woods, as if dropped from the sky — the brain gropes for something, anything that makes sense. It may retreat to a familiar ritual, like checking equipment. But it may also turn its attention outward, the researchers argue, and notice, say, a pattern in animal tracks that was previously hidden. The urge to find a coherent pattern makes it more likely that the brain will find one.”
The Administrative State Strikes Again. “We’ve long thought the Railway Labor Act should be rewritten for numerous reasons, but that is Congress’s job.”

Karl Rove Misses the Point on Health Care

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove says the Republicans are “winning the health care debate” and that “passing health-care reform could be harmful to the health of congressional Democrats.”

This, of course, is beside the point. If enacted, a massive expansion of government into the health care industry is unlikely to be reversed even if the GOP wins control of the Congress as a result in 2010 or 2012. With this new health care entitlement in place, the Republicans would be relegated even in victory to a role like that of the Tories in Britain, arguing over exactly how much taxpayer money to spend instead of whether to spend it at all. Accepting what is likely to be a permanent expansion of the size and scope of government for the sake of short-term electoral gain, as Rove does, seems like a poor trade-off for conservatives.

What I’m Reading — October 5^th

Fixing ‘Too Big to Fail.’ “During the crisis it was often said that officials at the Federal Reserve and Treasury would do ‘whatever it takes’ to avoid a Great Depression. Now they must do whatever it takes to address one of the key causes of the financial crisis: the existence of financial institutions that consider themselves too big to fail – but which are run in such a way that they are bound to do so.”
Why the Left Won’t Really Tackle Inequality.
Crowds Are Really Individuals. “What really happens in crowdsourcing as it is practiced in wide variety of contexts, from Wikipedia to open source to scientific research, is that a problem is broadcast to a large number of people with varying forms of expertise. Then individuals motivated by obsession, competition, money or all three apply their individual talent to creating a solution.”
John Thune: Time for a TARP Exit Strategy. “It is time to bring an end to the TARP emergency measures and come up with an exit strategy to get government out of the business of running businesses. The administration owes the American people a timeline for how it will do this.”
Nile Gariner on the Great Irish Surrender. “The Irish ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon will pave the way for the biggest erosion of national sovereignty in Europe since the Second World War.”

Nathaniel Ward