Theodore Dalrymple, MD worked for the British Health Service for many years prior to becoming a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. In the review section of last weekend’s Wall Street Journal he wrote an article based on his British experience, “New Efficiencies in Health Care? Not Likely.” He began with this: “All […]
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This April is Earth Day’s 41st anniversary. In 1970, Yale law professor Charles Reich, published a remarkably popular, fundamentally naive book, The Greening of America. He argued that a new, non-materialistic, environmentally sensitive culture was emerging in a “Consciousness III.” Reich discounted the value of conventional religion. Instead, Greening celebrated the counterculture and fostered an […]
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Twice a week, John Goodman, president and founder of NCPA in Dallas, writes a blog. Most are on health care, but a few are wider issues. John uses a finely polished economic lens to help us see through complex and often disguised or misrepresented governmental programs. Here is a slightly abridged version of his recent […]
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I can’t think of any single act of government that creates more inequality than the lottery—at least per dollar raised and spent. Think about it. Thousands of (mostly below-average income) people buy tickets and, after the drawing, one of them becomes immensely wealthy. As far as I can tell, the single largest winner in the […]
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Bozeman has excellent schools. Bozeman High often ranks among the top 6 percent of America’s government run schools with over a dozen AP classes. It has terrific music and athletic programs. A national organization, Great Schools, gives BHS a perfect 10. More impressive, a few years ago a small group of students wanted a course […]
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Vogue, America’s leading fashion magazine, is one of those glossy periodicals providing in David Brooks’ words “nutrition for the imagination.” He asks, “Why do we eagerly seek out images of lives we are unlikely to lead?” Perhaps of greater interest, why did a magazine that a year ago launched an auction to advance, “…human rights […]
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How can the federal government encourage low-cost, high-quality medical care? There are basically two approaches: a bottom-up, market-based approach and a top-down command-and-control approach: The former is based on competition, markets and economic incentives; the latter is based on rules, regulations, fines and penalties. The former gets the economic incentives right for all of the […]
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Just after President Washington’s birthday celebration, the Wall Street Journal reported that the protests beginning in Wisconsin had spread to a dozen other states including Montana. I find this a fitting tribute to the wisdom of America’s founders—and to Wisconsin, often a harbinger of political reform. First, consider the Founding Fathers. They well understood the […]
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There is one group of workers who have signed a consent decree with the federal government, agreeing to never form a union. Do you know who they are? Answer below the fold. The economics of unions is quite simple. Like medieval guilds, the goal of a modern union is to monopolize the supply of labor […]
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From USA Today (January 16, 2011) Most people intuitively know that the worst thing government can do in the middle of the deepest recession in 70 years is enact policies that increase the expected cost of labor. Yet that is exactly what happened last spring, with the passage of the health care reform bill, says […]
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