Days before America celebrates its freedom, the county clerks for Oakland, Macomb and Wayne counties announced Operation: Our Troops Count an all-out campaign to make sure overseas troops votes get here in time to be counted on Election Day. (left to …
Sarah Palin just held a live press conference from Wasilla, AK stating that she is resigning her post as governor. WOW. Gov. Sarah Palin will resign her office in a few weeks, she said during a news conference at her…
MANILA, Philippines - Filipinos abroad are more eager to participate in the forthcoming 2010 presidential polls than past elections. The Commission on Elections (Comelec) yesterday reported a surge in the number of Filipinos in the United States and …
Save us from the Austrians! Is it just the “narcissim of small differences,” or is it especially annoying when self-proclaimed “specialists” like Michael Pento get it vaguely right — but not because they really understand anything, but only because they’ve memorized a few free-market slogans and econobabble statistics? Or is it just his sheer amateurishness? The raving about “Phillips Swerve analysis” and the “ay-po-gee” of the bond market rally? Well, not to complain — after all, he’s promised me 7% of his income (now if only he had an income).
Kudos to the folks of MacArthur’s Bakery in St. Louis for telling Rep. Russ Carnahan what they think about his vote on cap and trade: DSM, a Missouri blogger I met at the Conservative Heartland Leadership Conference, got the video…
Al Franken, a satirist known for his biting political humor, is headed to the U.S. Senate, the survivor of an epic legal struggle that opponent Norm Coleman finally conceded he couldn’t win. Franken’s triumph followed a 5-0 decision Tuesday by the …
One of the most bizarre and short sighted arguments that has risen in modern times features black Americans, who were once enslaved in this country and only make up 14% of the population, arguing that it’s okay to discriminate against…
This kind of moral/political commentary masquerading as economics is a very dangerous thing. Here’s a blog post by James Kwak, part of the Baseline Scenario blog, a cottage industry of quotable commentary on the current economic crisis (he and his colleagues like Simon Johnson are constantly showing up as “expert” interview subjects, mouthing off on whatever twist or turn happens to be in the news that day for admiring reporters).
Mark Thoma links to a medical paper that brings up the issue that few people want to talk about: at what point is the cost of medical care to extend life not justified? Like Thoma, I don’t have a great answer, except to point out that in a world of scarce resources, the answer cannot be that any effort to extend life by any small amount is always a good idea. (And as David Leonhardt explained, our health care system is certainly constrained by scarce resources, whether we like it or not.)
Set aside whether the fault is with this blog post or the sources it links to (it’s both). The problem here is the premise it is implicitly based on — the idea that medical goods and services are different from any other from the consumer’s point of view, or from a moral point of view. How can a “medical paper” opine on whether a health care cost is “justified”? Doesn’t each consumer have his own utility function for that, just as he does for all other goods and services, based on his personal needs, preferences, and endowments? Why is it useful to point to a New York Times’ reporter’s banal observation that these services are scarce resources? What services are not?
These questions only mean anything worth debating if you presume from the start that government is supposed to be paying for these things. That presumption makes these questions a matter of public choice, and this debatable. But if you assume that patients ought to be free to decide as they will, then who cares about any of this?
Framing it this way is not about actually debating the issue of scarce resources at all. For economists like Kwak (aptly named, I might add), the idea is to insert the unspoken premise of government involvement for its own sake — to make a “baseline scenario” of the debate, not to be questioned.
It appears that Ohio legislators will have another week to work on the state budget. We urge them to use the time wisely. By that we mean that they should continue to reject new taxes and should find a way to overrule Gov. Ted Strickland on legalized …
The New York Times has a suprisingly good profile on SC First Lady Jenny Sanford, the “woman scorned” in the Gov. Mark Sanford affair scandal. The piece talks about how she was and is arguably the woman “behind the man”…
