Here’s a letter I sent to The Wall Street Journal:
In “Central Banks Take Coordinated Action” (Nov. 30), Mr. Sparshott and Mr. Hilsenrath rightly point out that the Fed’s slashing of dollar swap interest rates by 50 basis points “doesn’t address the fundamental problems related to European government debt that now plague the financial system.”
By offering yet another wooden plank to the drowning Euro, Bernanke merely prolongs its inevitable destruction. Bad debt must be liquidated, not preserved. Protracted global recession ought to make that lesson clear.
European governments must be allowed to default so they can undergo the painful but necessary process of reining in bloated public sectors and deregulating rigid markets. Helicopter Ben showering greenbacks over Paris and Rome provides the opposite incentive. He only assures that the Eurozone’s fall will be even harder.
Matthew Melchiorre Adjunct Analyst Competitive Enterprise Institute Washington
SEN. JIM INHOFE: “Kyoto Process is Dead” “Today, I’m happy to bring you the good news about the complete collapse of the global warming movement and the failure of the Kyoto Protocol, as world leaders meet for the United Nations global warming conference in Durban, South Africa. For the past decade, I have been the leader in the United States Senate standing up against global warming alarmism and cap-and-trade, which would have been the largest tax increase in American history. This victory is especially important today, as families in America and around the world continue to face tough economic times. Tossing out any remote possibility of a UN global warming treaty is one of the most important things we can do for the economy.”
IRIN CARMON: “Obama Says No to Plan B for Teens” “In an extraordinary statement, FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg said she agreed with an internal study that ‘there is adequate and reasonable, well-supported and science-based evidence that Plan B One-Step is safe and effective and should be approved for non-prescription use for all females of child-bearing potential.’ But, she said, the secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, disagreed. Sebelius issued her own wishy-washy statement, claiming there wasn’t enough data on the drug’s effects on adolescents.”
PETER BOETTKE: “McCloskey’s Transition to Austrian Economics” “Back in the mid 1990s, I attended Deirdre McCloskey’s first talk at the AEA meetings after her coming out publicly as a transgender person. She had not yet had her subsequent medical procedures, let alone written her telling memoir Crossings. McCloskey stood before a packed room of 500, dressed in a stylish dress and wig, and proudly announced ‘I am an economist in transition.’ [pause] ‘I am transitioning from a Chicago economist to an Austrian economist.’ Whatever awkwardness or tension that existed in the room was dispelled with that quip, and McCloskey proceeded to give a wonderful talk on the importance of rhetoric within the economy, pursuing a theme she had developed with Arjo Klamer in “One Quarter of GDP is Persuasion.’”
AEI’s Sally Satel had a good piece in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal discussing some of the nuances of the issue. Unfortunately, the headline on Dr. Satel’s op-ed misrepresents the nature of the ruling. (For the record, neither the author nor the primary editor of most newspaper articles has any control over the headlines.) So, here’s a bit more context.
Until recently, bone marrow donations could only be performed by having a large, thick, and very very painful needle pierced through your pelvic bone in order to suck out the liquid marrow. Today, however, the majority of marrow donations are not actually donations of marrow at all. Instead, peripheral blood stem cells are isolated from circulating blood, and those stem cells develop into bone marrow in the new patient. That means that most “marrow” donations can be as simple (more or less) as giving blood at your office’s annual blood drive. (It’s a slightly more extensive process than that. But you get the point.) That’s been a tremendous boon to patients needing marrow transplants, since the process is now far less invasive, less painful, and less risky in the majority of cases.
In this installment of “Fred Weekly, CEI President Fred L. Smith, Jr., discusses the importance of applying technical concepts to commercial development and vice versa. Fred explains that the feedback loop between science and commerce has been one of the greatest forces for improving human life in all of history. Watch it below:
Anti-smoking advocates were in full throttle in Germany after former Chancellor of West Germany Helmut Schmidt kept puffing on his cigarette during a television interview last Sunday. In the Charlie Rose interview on German public broadcaster ARD, the 92-year-old Schmidt commented on German reunification and recent European history. He also said that smoking lots of cigarettes is responsible for his mental sharpness at his advanced age.
Activists against smoking were incensed – they called his smoking and comments on TV an outrage and charged that ARD was violating the anti-smoking laws and was endangering the health of the TV crew and the audience by allowing Schmidt to smoke.
Smoking supporters now have a new hero — certainly Schmidt’s distinguished looks belie his years, and his comments show he is still sharp. And, he has a full head of hair. Watch below:
Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour has called the Obama administration “far and away the most liberal administration that we’ve ever had in the White House.” Other conservatives and Republicans feel the same. In his book Pinheads and Patriots, Conservative commentator Bill O’Riley writes that Obama is “the most liberal president I’ve seen in my lifetime.” Yet ignoring his rhetoric, several policy areas suggest that the president is much less liberal than his critics – and defenders – would have us believe.
Consider the president’s handling of immigration. Obama won 67 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2008, but his policies are now pushing Latinos away. His favorable rating among Latinos fell to all time lows last month in part because this administration is on pace to deport more undocumented immigrants in one term – over 1.5 million – than Bush did in two. The number of employer immigration audits has quadrupled since 2009, and companies have were fined $6.9 million last year, nearly ten times as much as the Bush administration’s $675,000 in 2008.
The “most liberal administration ever” has been equally unkind to gamblers. In April this year, the Justice Department shut down America’s leading online poker sites, arrested top officials, and seized over $3 billion in assets. It’s not just the companies’ money either. Millions of dollars in winnings owed to online players were among the assets taken by the government leaving players without legal recourse.
“Liberal” used to mean opposition to social engineering, but apparently no longer. The Obama administration through its FDA is currently in a legal fight to place graphic images onto every cigarette pack in America, including photos of dead and diseased smokers. Last year, the FDA banned the popular caffeinated alcoholic beverage Four Loko. More quietly, the Obama administration has worked to ban synthetic cannabis and herbal bath salts.
Point of Law has an interesting debate over whether medical-malpractice noneconomic damage caps hurt consumers, between Ted Frank and Shirley Svorny. As Frank notes, “medical malpractice awards are” often “haphazard,” failing to distinguish between negligent and non-negligent physicians (jurors are, after all, not experts in medicine, and may be unable to understand scientific concepts that undergird some malpractice lawsuits). As Svorny notes, however, malpractice verdicts are not purely random, and thus provide some disincentive for negligence.
In a rational world, we would have specialized health courts to decide malpractice disputes, the way many other civilized countries do, since such tribunals are better able to see through unfounded malpractice claims and detect genuine negligence by doctors than are uninformed juries of laypeople. But state constitutional rights to jury trials often exist in state courts, and in federal courts, the Seventh Amendment right to jury trial applies, making it impossible to totally abolish such trials in malpractice cases despite their often erroneous results. (By contrast, in most states, legislators could toughen up limits on junk science in malpractice cases, although liberal activist judiciaries in a few states have thwarted legislative attempts to do so.) Perhaps legislators could impose stringent caps on malpractice cases tried in regular court, while giving specialized administrative tribunals more leeway to award damages. That way, people who have genuinely suffered lots of damages due to doctors’ negligence could do so before a tribunal of experts that has the expertise to distinguish between meritorious and meritless claims, while people with weak claims who wish to play litigation lottery would remain free to seek lesser amounts of damages in regular court before a jury of their (often uneducated) peers.
Arizona: Liberalization of beer laws in Arizona has kick-started the state’s craft brewing market. The state allows small producers to skip the wholesaling tier of distribution, allowing them to sell directly to consumers. Unfortunately, the law defined small brewers as producing less than 620,000 gallons per year, which forced many brewers to cut production. In 2009 the state increased the cap to 1,240,000 gallons per year and the number of breweries in the state has grown every year since. Hopefully the legislature will take a hint and let breweries of all sizes skip the wholesaler tier if they want to.
Michigan: Former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm apparently did at least one right thing (even a broken clock is right twice a day) when she signed legislation into law that did away with the Sunday ban on alcohol sales until after noon. For the last year 6,000 businesses throughout the state forked out the $160 for the annual license that allows them to start selling alcohol at 7am on Sundays. According to the Michigan Liquor Control Commission, the change has resulted in a $950,000 increase in revenue for the state.
Also in Michigan: As I predicted in my article, the new state keg-tagging laws have already resulted in a significant drop in keg sales and paper-work headaches for businesses.
Minnesota: This November the Minneapolis City Council passed amendments, removing the required 300 feet of distance between alcohol-serving -selling businesses and houses of worship. As I wrote about in November, this regulatory liberation is the direct result of small brewers pushing for updates to Minnesota laws that allow them to operate, profit, and stimulate the state economy.
TERENCE CORCORAN: “The Dark Side of Green Energy” “In the annals of Canadian green energy policy, nothing stands out like Ontario’s headlong rush into becoming a world leader in the business. In the belief that politics can defy economics, politicians all over the world are making the big bet that they can overturn the hard rules of supply and demand, the role of prices and the limits of innovation by pushing the right policy buttons. ”
NILE GARDINER: “Paul Krugman’s Big Government Prescription for Europe Proves That U.S. Liberals Are Stuck in a Time Warp” “All over Europe governments have begun to implement austerity measures in an effort to rein in spending and reduce crippling budget deficits. It is hard to find a major European leader these days still advocating the kind of large-scale stimulus spending championed by the Obama Administration in the United States over the past three years.”
DAVID POST: “Stop the Online Piracy Act” “In several recent postings (here and here, for example) I called on all interested persons to come to the Internet’s defense against a spate of truly dreadful bills now making their way through Congress (the “Protect IP Act” and SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act”). Larry Downes, always a thoughtful voice on tech matters, has an interesting piece in Forbes about the rather astonishing outcry that the bills have engendered. As someone who’s been doing Internet law for almost 20 years, I can’t remember any issue galvanizing public opinion in quite this way since the 1996 “Communications Decency Act” [outlawing “indecency” on the Net — good luck with that!].”
Kidney sales should be legal, explains kidney donor Alexander Berger in The New York Times. Berger is a research analyst for GiveWell, a nonprofit that helps charitable donors decide where to give. As Berger notes, allowing kidney donors to be compensated would save countless lives by providing people with an incentive to donate their kidneys. Right now, you have to be unusually altruistic to donate a kidney, since you have to spend several days in the hospital to donate one, take off a lot of time from work, and run a tiny, tiny risk of death from surgery. Most people just aren’t that altruistic. Allowing kidney sales would also help the poor, who currently often unable to obtain kidneys: as Berger notes, people unable to get kidney transplants now are “disproportionately African-American and poor.”
If kidney sales were legal, the taxpayers would save money, too, since the government would be able to give kidneys to poor people and elderly people who need them, with the increased number of kidneys that would become available due to kidney sales, rather than paying for incredibly costly and debilitating dialysis treatment, which has consumed billions of tax dollars over the years. It would be much cheaper for the government to buy a kidney for a poor or elderly person rather than paying for years and years of dialysis. As Berger notes, paying for kidneys would likely “save the government money; taxpayers already foot the bill for dialysis for many patients through Medicare, and research has shown that transplants save more than $100,000 per patient, relative to dialysis.”
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