A program in Michigan that saved 1500 lives over 18 months by maintaining checklists on patient care to prevent hospital infections has been shut down by the federal government.  The federal Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) defines the concept of a medical “experiment” so broadly that keeping tabs on patient care through checklists is deemed an “experiment” that requires express permission in advance from patients and physicians.  To OHRP, it is better that patients die than that they be subjected to an “experiment” and…

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The Washington, D.C. school system recently spent tens of millions of dollars to buy sophisticated new boilers to heat the schools.  Then it allowed them to break down because it wouldn’t spend a mere $100,000 per year maintaining them.  It wouldn’t do the most basic things to keep them from deteriorating, like treating water to remove mineral deposits that build up in (and ultimately destroy) boilers.  Now, it is spending more than $10 million per year to replace new boilers that are being destroyed through neglect.

It’s elementary…

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Trying to “fix” health care is not easy, since it’s a bizarre amalgam of private provision of insurance and public spending and regulation, completely distorted by the counterproductive incentives of pervasive third-party payment. But one very simple step would be to simply have a national market in health insurance. Explains Merrill Mathews of the Council for Affordable Health Insurance in The Wall Street Journal (subscription required):

Why can’t people living in New Jersey buy health insurance available to residents of, say, Pennsylvania?

Rep.…

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In his Examiner column today, Tim Carney — with a nod to Bastiat — takes the company founded by Thomas Edison to task for eschewing innovation in favor of political rent seeking:

Had Thomas Edison employed the same business strategy as his 21st-Century heirs at General Electric, he would have lobbied Congress to outlaw the candle in 1879 when he perfected and patented the light bulb.

He surely could have masked his self-interested lobbying in some public interest claim, such as fire prevention or…

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According to Bill McKibben in an op-ed in The Washington Post, the biggest news of the year is that Jim Hansen has spoken. According to Hansen, who has risen in recent years from astronomer to wizard and now to high priest of a doomsday cult, the safe level for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can be no more than 350 parts per million.  So since it’s now 380 or 390 ppm, we’re already doomed and can stop worrying about it.

Oh,…

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There is nothing new in a New York Times story about the GMO standoff in Europe. It is a political standoff, caused by activists who claim to represents consumers. Consumers, on the other hand, have shown that they don’t really give a damn when it comes to selecting one or the other in the store. Dr. Nicholas Kalaitzandonakes, of the University of Missouri-Columbia, and his team have since replicated these surprising results in China.

The science is fairly settled at this…

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A new British government report has concluded that…wait…wait…wait.. getting rid of bad teachers will improve schools. Wow. I’m amazed.

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Yule never came to Rosia Montana, Romania, this year. With the help of activists such as billionaire George Soros and British actress Vanessa Redgrave, it seems that Western European activists has prevented an environmental cleanup and a sustainable livelihood for the 4,000 people who live there.

Like getting a lump of coal, the poor people of Rosia Montana had their dreams for improved quality of life and prosperity for their village crushed. They will have to continue to live with no…

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Humanitarians are perplexed by the fact that, despite their hard work and the fact that it’s the epicenter of the world’s largest aid effort, starvation in Darfur is increasing at a rapid pace. As reported by The New York Times today, malnutrition among children in the region jumped this year to over 16 percent, a 3 percent increase from last year.

Dr. Rigal said he was not exactly sure why child malnutrition rates were rising. But he cited more insecurity, restricted…

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Benazir Bhutto, who was murdered in a politically-motivated suicide attack, was the closest the Islamic world has yet got to a secular free-marketeer as a leader. Sadly, she dressed that in socialist rhetoric and demagoguery, and instituted authoritarian policies towards the press and judiciary that helped contribute to her downfall in the 1990s. The Telegraph’s commendably objective obituary is here. After her ineffective first premiership, many forget that her second tenure was almost Thatcherite:

Her tight monetary policy produced a dramatic…

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Anna Schwartz, longtime colleague of the late Milton Friedman and celebrated free-market economist in her own right, had some interesting things to say about the current credit crunch. In a story published on December 23 in the London newspaper the Telegraph, Schwartz told reporter Ambrose Evans-Pritchard that the buckets of money being thrown into the system by central banks in the U.S. and Europe were not getting to the root of problem. In fact, they were probably making things worse.

“Liquidity doesn’t do…

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—As CEI’s prez Fred Smith will tell you. Over the holiday, our friend Sally Pipes at the Pacific Research Institute penned a Washington Post oped called “Brave New Diet” on the growing food police movement in America, pointing out some bugs in the “BMI” calculus and making other observations about sensible, healthy behavior. Indeed, a lot of us are overweight and don’t exercise. But as Sally says:

People make choices. And government should protect — not restrict — the freedom…

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Imagine you are going on vacation and you pay your neighbor to tend to the hanging plants you have outside of your house. While you’re gone the weather turns and a frost sets in, eventually killing all of your plants. You return home and are understandably distraught to find out that your neighbor neglected to bring your plants indoors,  allowing them to perish in the harsh elements.  You promptly file vandalism charges against your neighbor for the damage done to…

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Employers pay a lot of money for diversity training and sexual harassment training, but often the training backfires and blows up in the face of the employer that paid for it.  In Hartman v. Pena (1995), the Federal Aviation Administration got sued for sexual harassment after it subjected employees to three days of diversity training that scapegoated white males.  After a federal judge refused to dismiss the case against it, the agency had to pay out a settlement to the white male employee…

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It’s Christmas Eve (although you probably won’t read this until some time after) and I’m sitting in front front of the television now watching the St. Olaf College Christmas Festival. This morning I listened to the radio broadcast of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from the famous King’s College Chapel at Cambridge University. Both festivals date from the early decades of the 20th century, both are widely listened to around the world, and both involve lots of wonderful Christmas…

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Monsanto has talked the federal government into giving farmers a break on their crop insurance if they use crops that produce pesticides. If other companies are involved in this too, it is a good thing–it is reasonable that lower risk crops should have a lower premium. It is not reasonable that only Monsanto’s pesticide producing crops should be considered lower risk.

The greens are crying foul though; they claim this is rent seeking and corruption, government should not “endorse a product”…

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Leave it to Congress to make things worse under the guise of promoting new energy sources and environmental protection.  If you want to understand how government mucks up the market, explains Ben Lieberman of the Heritage Foundation, just look back a few years:

If it’s a low-flush toilet, that is. These water-stingy models were mandated under the 1992 Energy Policy Act. After the provisions took effect in 1994, millions of Americans remodeling their bathrooms came in for an unpleasant surprise. Many…

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There may be no less appreciated industry than insurance.  We hate paying for it and hope never to use it.  If we make a claim, the company is devoted to protecting its own interest irrespective of what we want.

The health insurance industry naturally yields up more than a few “Roger Moore” moments, examples of denial of benefits which, no matter the justification, look like examples of greedy corporations sacrificing helpless people.  Cigna has recently been hit over its initial denial…

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Now the Italian food police are after my cultural heritage!

The Italian version of FDA is concerned that Swedish gingerbread has too high levels of coumarin. Coumarin constitutes the skeleton of many flavanoid compounds, or to put it more succinctly, coumarin is the building block of many flavorings we use in our food, such as cinnamon. The Swedes don’t really think it is a problem, but then the Italians probably haven’t discovered Surströmming yet, which is fermented herring, the smell alone…

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I have an issue with this holiday fuzzy feeling piece from Marketplace, because the anchor’s intro goes as follows: “Crisco is a staple in many American kitchens and a must-have for homemade pies. But it’s also an invented food made by chemists …”

An invented food made by chemists, how little does a reporter have to know about the history of food to know that most all of it is made by chemists? Those chemists are often called, mom, pop, grandma,…

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