Nathaniel Ward

What I’m Reading — January 12th

  • Did Deregulation Really Cause the Crash? Russ Roberts: “If you lift the speed limit from 65 miles per hour to 200 miles per hour and someone crashes going 195, it would be strange to blame the crash on the change in the speed limit. The question remains as to why someone would be so reckless.”
  • Teaching Business School Students to Think Creatively.
  • The Right Way and the Wrong Way to Simplify Taxes. “For the Obama Administration, the new regulation is a way to try to increase tax revenues without Congress having to pass a law…Here’s a better idea: If Washington doesn’t like taxpayers working the system of legal deductions to reduce their tax burden, it can always simplify the code and flatten the rates.”


What I’m Reading — January 6th

  • Rock Solid HTML Emails How to build e-mails that work in every e-mail client.
  • How Apple Leaks Information “Often Apple has a need to let information out, unofficially. The company has been doing that for years, and it helps preserve Apple’s consistent, official reputation for never talking about unreleased products.”
  • Todd Zywicki on Proposed New Credit Card Limits. “What would happen if the Merchants Payments Coalition gets its way and politicians squeeze interchange fees? Credit cards are essentially a closed economic system: A reduction in interchange fees will have to be offset by increased revenues elsewhere or a reduction in costs. For example, issuers could try to increase the revenue generated from consumers through higher interest payments, higher penalty fees, or reinstating annual fees.”


What I’m Reading — January 3rd

  • What Made American Universities Great. “Ivy League institutions rose to greatness only after being cut off from state aid and meddling.”
  • What’s the Matter With California? William Vogeli explains how the “big-spending, high-taxing, lousy-services paradigm” is ruining California’s appeal.
  • Dave Barry Looks Back on 2009. Choice quote: “Washington, rejecting ‘business as usual,’ finally stopped trying to solve every problem by throwing billions of taxpayer dollars at it and instead started trying to solve every problem by throwing trillions of taxpayer dollars at it.”


What I’m Reading — December 23rd

  • 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.”