• 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

• 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

• 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?

• 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.”

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.