http://www.nathanielward.net Mon, 22 Aug 2011 12:14:33 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 http://www.nathanielward.net/2009/12/what-im-reading-december-23rd/ http://www.nathanielward.net/2009/12/what-im-reading-december-23rd/#comments Wed, 23 Dec 2009 17:44:19 +0000 Nathaniel Ward http://www.nathanielward.net/?p=568

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.”

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Mark Steyn on the Birthers. “A true conspiracy theorist would surely believe that Obama deliberately started the birth-certificate business in order to make it easier to dismiss his opponents as deranged.”

A Time for Choosing, Redux. “For centrists in both parties the moment has come to decide which side of the public-private divide they want the U.S. and its future workers to be on.”

Can the Fed Prevent Bubbles? The new president of the New York Federal Reserve, Donald Luskin writes, “thinks the Fed should be responsible for identifying and preventing asset-price bubbles. Considering that the Fed’s track record reveals more skill at causing bubbles than preventing them, this is a very dangerous idea.”

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