Okay — it’s almost Halloween, so I should be forgiven for a non-policy posting on the Top Ten Scariest Movies.  I’ve picked a sample of top ten listings to check out any unanimity in the selections.  Not really, ‘though several films appear on almost every list - Psycho (1960), Night of the Living Dead (1968), Halloween (1978).  Most of the scariest are horror or sci-fi films, with lots of gore and special effects, but a significant number of the top ones are psychological thrillers.  Here are some links to the lists here, here, here and here.

There’s also a list of the 10 Top Terrifying Non-Horror movies here. Two of my own favorites in that category - but not listed - are Brazil (1985) and Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975).

Here’s my compilation of the 10 scariest:

Psycho (1960)

The Exorcist  (1973)

The Shining (1980)

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

Halloween (1978)

Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

Alien (1979)

Rosemary’s Baby (1979)

Silence of the Lambs (1991)

With truly scary things happening on Capitol Hill — government takeover of the health care system, attempts to suppress the use of energy through diabolical cap-and-trade schemes, more government controls on private markets together with expansion of government enterprises, and higher and higher taxes to finance the largess — maybe these films won’t seem so scary at all.

Now, Brand has written a new book, called Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, in which he takes on these environmental shibboleths in a more concerted fashion.  On American Public Radio’s Marketplace program yesterday, host Kai Ryssdal discussed the new book with Brand.  Asked what prompted him to write the book, Brand said that,

“My fellow environmentalists have been wrong about a couple of issues and were getting in the way of important things we should be doing, both with biotechnology and with nuclear technology, and in terms of how we think about cities, and in terms of how I know we’re going to think about geoengineering–that is, direct intervention in the climate.”

Ryssdal contrasted Brand’s earlier support for the back to the land movement with his current belief that big cities are better for the environment.

“Not only big cities, but big slums … that’s how [poor people in the developing world] are getting out of poverty.  They’re emptying out a lot of the subsistence farms that have been tough on the landscape all over the world, moving into towns for opportunity, building jobs for each other.  They’re also moving up what’s called the energy ladder, toward more and better grid electricity.  By and large the cities are probably the greenest thing that humans do.”

On his support for biotech crops, Brand said,

“Already, the crops we have now, the herbicide-tolerant and the insect-resistant crops … [are] getting what amounts to higher yields. You can raise more food on less land, and all of that is good for ecology in general and the climate particularly.”

Challenged that critics call them Frankenfoods, Brand replied,

“The idea there was that Dr. Frankenstein was doing something against nature, and that somehow the genetically engineered food crops are against nature.  And as a biologist, I’m just baffled by that line of argument because agriculture has been in that sense against nature for 10,000 years. That we’re finally able to do more precise tuning of the crops is a huge gain, not a loss.”

As I explain in a new Competitive Enterprise Institute paper out today, “A Cure Worse than the Disease: Obama Care Won’t Cut Costs, But May Cut Quality,” most of the alleged cost-cutting measures in the Baucus bill merely shift costs from the federal government onto the states or private payers, without affecting long-term health care inflation.  The only measures that could reduce the annual rate of growth in health care costs would erect government barriers between patients and their doctors, while jeopardizing long-term medical innovation.

Skeptics have made hay arguing that the so-called Sustainable Growth Rate can’t be counted on to cut $245-billion in Medicare spending. But Senate Finance Committee negotiators have designed a Medicare Commission—what the White House previously called an Independent Medicare Advisory Commission—to make similar cuts in physician and hospital payment rates in a more opaque way.

In an April New York Times interview, President Obama suggested that such a group, working outside of “normal political channels,” should guide decisions regarding that “huge driver of cost…the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives.”  That’s not exactly a death panel roving the country to pull the plug on innocent grandmas who’ve survived past their sell-by dates, but the effects could be equally pernicious.

What the Medicare Commission is likely to do is work with the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute also established by the Baucus bill to incorporate comparative clinical effectiveness recommendations into Medicare and Medicaid payment policies.

In theory, there’s nothing wrong with comparative effectiveness research, or what used to be called evidence-based medicine.  Good research comparing the clinical effectiveness, risks, and benefits of two or more medical treatments can help doctors better understand the likely benefits of the treatments they prescribe and improve the quality of care they deliver.  But patients vary substantially in their individual physiology, their response rates to drugs and surgical procedures, and their willingness to tolerate side effects.  Doctors know this, and they realize that one size definitely does not fit all. That’s why, in practice, evidence-based medicine in the U.S. and abroad has produced incrementally useful information, but has failed to systematically change the practice of medicine.

Generally, we should encourage efforts to eliminate waste and reduce the use of ineffective treatments, especially when we’re talking about public programs and taxpayer money.  But the only way these programs would result in significant savings is if legislation or subsequent implementation tries to force the square peg of comparative effectiveness research results into the round hole of clinical practice by requiring physicians to always pick the treatment deemed best for the average patient.

That’s not just bad for patients in the near term, it would also wreak havoc on long term medical innovation.  If every new medicine were required, immediately upon gaining regulatory approval, to be effective and cheap enough to get the support of bureaucratic bean counters, research on the next generation of treatments for cancer, heart disease, and countless other serious conditions would slow to a snail’s pace.

Get used to the innovative medical treatments that we already have today.  If these programs become part of our health care system, we’ll be seeing a lot fewer treatment innovations tomorrow.

It is true that a handful of states have highly concentrated markets.  In Hawaii, Rhode Island, and Alaska, for example, 95 percent or more of the health insurance market is served by just two insurers.  But, federal intervention would do nothing to address this problem.  After all, insurers are still governed by state competition law, which prohibits anticompetitive practices.

The main benefit insurers get from McCarran-Ferguson is antitrust immunity for sharing the actuarial data on which firms individually base their premiums.  Ordinarily, information sharing of that kind of  would be a big no no, since it suggests pricing collusion.  But, state insurance laws permit it because it helps small insurers gain access to a sufficiently large pool of information to set premiums at an appropriate level.

The only way federal antitrust enforcement could significantly reduce market concentration would be to break up the firms into smaller pieces—think of the dissolution of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil trust, or the break up of AT&T’s local service monopoly into seven regional Baby Bells.  But, as Boston University health economist Austin Frakt  notes:

“Taxpayers will be best served by insurers with sufficient market power to bargain down provider rates, but with not quite enough power to keep the savings (“rents”) for themselves.  … How to balance the power of insurers and providers is far from simple. Many have pointed to the alleged dominant market position of insurers as a substantial source of high health care costs. However, the health economics literature supports the notion that recent increased market power of insurers does not lead toward monopolistic pricing, but rather it provides a counter-balance to the power held by hospitals and provider groups.”  (Hat tip, Tyler Cowen.)

Democrats know this of course.  And, in the end, it’s not clear that they really do intend to repeal McCarran-Ferguson, or if they’re just sending a signal to health insurers and other dissenters that “this is how we deal with people who stand in our way.”  As my wife said yesterday, they’re playing Chicago hard ball now.  They’ll do whatever it takes to win.

The British Chiropractic Association was none too happy about these criticisms of themselves and their craft.  But, instead of accepting the Guardian’s offer to publish a 500-word response and a note in the “corrections” section of the newspaper, the BCA took advantage of Britain’s insane libel laws and sued Singh.  Singh, who of course has copious amounts of published scientific research to back up his claims, decided to fight the suit in court.  But, due to Britain’s insane libel laws, he lost.  Reasons include  the fact that, in the UK, any person or organization with almost any amount of national reputation may bring a libel action for even the slightest deprecation without having to show any actual damages.  Then, once in court, the normal burden of proof is switched, such that the defendant must prove his statements to be completely true, rather than the plaintiff proving them to be false. And UK judges tend to be very favorably inclined toward plaintiffs.

Although Singh’s article mentioned the BCA only once, the judge interpreted that key passage (”happily promotes bogus treatments”) as a direct allegation of purposeful dishonesty:

12. What the article conveys is that the BCA itself makes claims to the public as to the efficacy of chiropractic treatment for certain ailments even though there is not a jot of evidence to support those claims. That in itself would be an irresponsible way to behave and it is an allegation that is plainly defamatory of anyone identifiable as the culprit. In this case these claims are expressly attributed to the claimant. It goes further. It is said that despite its outward appearance of respectability, it is happy to promote bogus treatments. Everyone knows what bogus treatments are. They are not merely treatments which have proved less effective than they were at first thought to be, or which have been shown by the subsequent acquisition of more detailed scientific knowledge to be ineffective. Bogus treatments equate to quack remedies; that is to say they are dishonestly presented to a trusting and, in some respects perhaps, vulnerable public as having proven efficacy in the treatment of certain conditions or illnesses, when it is known that there is nothing to support such claims.

13. It is alleged that the claimant promotes the bogus treatments “happily”. What that means is not that they do it naively or innocently believing in their efficacy, but rather that they are quite content and, so to speak, with their eyes open to present what are known to be bogus treatments as useful and effective. That is in my judgment the plainest allegation of dishonesty and indeed it accuses them of thoroughly disreputable conduct.

Singh claims he merely intended to suggest that the BCA and other chiropractic supporters were “deluded and reckless,” not dishonest, and he notes that several other passages in the article support that interpretation.  But, even if that were not the case, since there is plenty of scientific evidence that chiropractic manipulation is bogus, you’d think that would be sufficient defense.  But, it is often said that, under UK libel law, the truth is no defense. Did I mention that the UK has insane lible laws?

This case would be bad enough if it were unique.  Unfortunately, this kind of thing happens all too often.  In a world of global print and Internet publishing, the UK has become a venue for so-called libel tourism, in which slighted plaintiffs from all over the world bring suit in British courts against defendants located outside the UK merely because their comments have been published or re-posted in magazines, books, or websites that happen to appear in Britain.  There is no doubt that British libel law exerts a chilling effect on free speech generally, and on criticism of quack science and bad governance more specifically.  Fortunately, the indispensible UK non-profit Sense About Science has begun a campaign to Keep Libel Laws Out of Science.  I encourage readers interested in defending the right of honest criticism to click the link and learn more.

As I wrote two weeks ago, however, Snowe may be getting more (or less) than she bargained for.  Once a bill is reported out of committee, it gets to be amended after debate by the entire Senate, and again when the final Senate compromise goes to conference and has to be reconciled with the House bill.  You may think you’re playing nice with your Senate Finance Committee colleagues and getting as good a deal as can be expected from that nice old Max Baucus.  But, trust me, Henry Waxman is ruthless.

Indeed, the House bill contains a government-run, or ”public,” health insurance option and a number of other key features that were steadfastly opposed by moderate Democrats and liberal Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee.  As the National Journal’s Marilyn Werber Serafini wrote earlier today:

House Democrats have ruled out an excise tax on high-end insurance plans as a way to pay for health reform, although that is a primary revenue raiser in Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus’s plan. House Democrats are considering limiting their proposed health care surtax to individuals earning above $500,000 a year, and that leaves about a $100 billion funding shortfall for reform …

In the end, all of Sen. Snowe’s efforts to produce a compromise that the CBO now says will reduce the federal budget deficit during the ten-year budget window (which was laughable in the first place) are at risk of being for naught, since liberal Democrats remain committed to the public option and have even taken to demonizing Baucus for his willingness to compromise.

One of the best pieces of work on public choice was done by Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University, Governing the Commons. She’s looked at a huge number of commons problems in fisheries, grazing, water, fishing water rights, and stuff like that. She finds that the commons problem is solved by many of these institutions, but not all of them. Some of them cannot make it work. She’s interested in why some of them work and some of them don’t.

One example is the Swiss alpine cheese makers. They had a commons problem. They live very high, and they have a grazing commons for their cattle. They solved that problem in the year 1200 A.D. For about 800 years, these guys have had that problem solved. They have a simple rule: If you’ve got three cows, you can pasture those three cows in the commons if you carried them over from last winter. But you can’t bring new cows in just for the summer. It’s very costly to carry cows over to the winter—they need to be in barns and be heated, they have to be fed. [The cheese makers] tie the right to the commons to a private property right with the cows.

The entire interview is available in two parts. (Turn to page six of each issue; the Ostrom discussion is on page nine of part two.)

UPDATE: Vernon Smith comments on Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize in Forbes today:

Previous Nobel laureates such as Ronald Coase (1991), William Vickrey (1996) and Leonid Hurwicz (2007) have also made significant contributions to investigating these big questions, but Ostrom brings a distinct style in applying her skill in different methodologies. She blends field and laboratory empirical methods, economic and game theory, the really important ingredient of scientific common sense, and she constantly challenges her own understanding by looking at new potentially contrary evidence and designing new experiments to challenge her understanding of the emergent historical rules and the theory used to explicate them.

As I’ve written previously, the public option is not the worst aspect of the various health reform proposals, the purchase mandate is.  Still, these votes should be viewed as a strong positive, signalling broad concern about the extent of the Democratic position.

Of course, Liberal Democrats are fuming.  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.) and House Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Cal.) remain committed to a public option.  President Obama signalled his enduring support for it in his September 9 address to Congress, despite White House back-tracking from the public option during the August congressional recess.  And, now, two left-wing advocacy groups, the Progressive Campaign Change Committee and Democracy for America, have launched a television ad campaign condemning Baucus for his decision to move forward without a government-run health insurance option for the non-elderly middle class.

This should serve as a warning to conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans (Yes. I mean you, Olympia Snowe (RINO-Me.).  You may spend months negotiating a compromise with your Senate colleagues.  But, please remember that all that will be torn asunder once a bill is reported out of committee and gets to be amended after debate by the entire Senate, and again when the final Senate compromise goes to conference and has to be reconciled with the House bill.  You may think you’re playing nice with your Senate Finance Committee colleagues and getting as good a deal as can be expected from that nice old Max Baucus.  But, trust me, Henry Waxman is ruthless.

7-Eleven has fine stores that offer many conveniences to their customers, but in this case, they are trying to force down the throats of American consumers a “big gulp” of big government. If Congress acts on 7-Eleven’s misleading petition to put price controls on interchange fees, consumers will pay the price through the reduction of reward programs such as frequent flier miles, and the possible return of annual fees. Credit unions and community banks will pay the price too in higher costs that will make it more difficult to offer cards to their customers, forcing savers to go to big banks if they want the convenience of credit and debit cards.

Contrary to the spin of the 7-Eleven and other big retailers, interchange fees, also called “swipe fees,” are only levied on merchants, and none of major legislation before the U.S. Congress would require that retailers pass on one penny of their resulting savings on interchange fees to consumers. And Australia’s recent experience with interchange price controls resulted in no tangible benefits and plenty of added costs for consumers down under.

John Simon, a top regulator at the Reserve Bank of Australia, recently told a conference of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, that there was no evidence of retailer savings being passed on to Australian consumers, according to the Credit Union Times. Yet the Australian credit card holders faced plenty of costs to “make up for” the retailer costs in terms of higher fees and fewer rewards such as frequent flier miles, according to a study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

Community banks and credit unions, which have lower profit margins on their credit and debit card offerings, would also lose out. In Australia, the Credit Union Times reports, “a cap on card interchange similar to one promoted by some U.S. retailers has turned Australian CU card programs from being contributors to their bottom lines to net money losers.” Similarly, Mike Clayton, head of Champion Credit Union in the small town Canton, North Carolina, says price controls on interchange fees could “put us into a deficit on that card program.”

There are a variety of options for retailers in credit card payment services, such as new online methods of payment, to ensure competitive pricing. CEI also supports expanding the ability of retailers to form their own affiliated banks, or industrial lending companies, to do their own card processing if they so choose.

But lawmakers should also realize that credit and debit card processing is not free, and retailers would not be accepting cards if they did not lead to more purchases in stores and reduce the costs of alternatives such as carrying cash. Before credit cards were so prevalent, expensive armored cars hauling cash from retail stores were a common fixture.

In short, there is no such thing a free lunch, and lawmakers should not enable 7-Eleven and other retailers to soak consumers with more lunch fees.

Reform advocates have chalked up the under-30 set’s indifference about health care reform to an “information gap”.  But, with the White House’s extensive outreach on Twitter and other social networks, a full-court press by the DNC’s Organizing for America to reach young adults, and even an ad campaign by Rock the Vote featuring celebrities like Zach Braff and Perez Hilton, it’s hard to believe anyone in America has too little information.  More likely, we can chalk this indifference up to … well, youthful indifference to almost every sort of public policy debate.  No matter what the topic, when it comes to policy–as opposed to politics–young adults as a general rule just tend not to get involved.

Indeed, if they did learn more about the health care proposals being debated on Capitol Hill, one might imagine young adults would be pretty upset to learn that the Democrats want to force everyone in America to purchase an expensive health insurance policy that covers not just the benefits they most want, but the benefits a bunch of Washington bureaucrats decide they should have.  And, if they or their employers don’t buy such a health insurance policy, they’ll get hit with monetary penalties as high as $950 under the Senate Finance Committee plan or 2.5 percent of their income under the House proposal.

But one reason why so many young adults are uninsured is that they have chosen to forgo very expensive existing health insurance policies that have prices inflated by too many state and federal benefit, coverage, and premium regulations.  Those prices won’t come down under the Democrats’ proposals either.  Instead, they’ll climb even higher as the young and healthy get stuck in insurance risk pools with older and sicker Americans whose costs they’ll have to subsidize.  Indeed, to the extent that a mere 34 percent of those age 19 to 34 actively oppose the reform proposals (with another 34 percent in favor and 31 percent not sure), this probably CAN be attributed to an information gap–one in which America’s youth don’t fully understand what a raw deal this would be for them.

He’s been called a bully and a monopolist. Al Gore once labeled him “Darth Vader.” The Wall Street Journal described him as “ruthless” and alleged “self-dealing” in a maze of complicated business transactions. He is a master of the tax-free deal, completely disdains government and most federal regulations, and has expressed a fondness for Rush Limbaugh. This summer he was slapped with a $1.4-million fine by the Justice Department for illegal stock purchases.

Sounds like the perfect target for a hard-hitting Michael Moore documentary, no? But no, we’re talking about Moore’s latest sugar daddy: cable mogul John Malone.

That’s right, Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” is being co-financed and distributed domestically by Overture Films, which is a unit of Malone’s Liberty Media. Moore, who has been railing against Big Media during press junkets promoting the movie, is in bed with the Goldman Sachs of the media world.

Unsurprisingly, Moore tries to excuse this incongruity by appealing to some corporatist state ideal.

Moore, through a spokesman, isn’t making any apologies for having one of Malone’s companies as a backer of his film. “The movie is about HOW people make their money, and specifically criticizes the beast, our out-of-control economic system. …  And for those folks who make their money in ways that don’t exploit or hurt others, then they should be giving a lot more back in tax dollars to help support a more just and fair society. People like John Malone, myself and others who have been blessed, we all ought to be in a 70% tax bracket with the money being used to provide such important services as a real universal and affordable single-payer healthcare system.”

Of course, there is nothing preventing Michael Moore from writing a check to the IRS surrendering the 70 percent of his enormous income, which, by his own view, he does not deserve. As for Malone, the question of “how” posed by Moore’s spokesman should be asked of him. And I’d love to hear his reaction to his business partner’s 70-percent tax proposal.

This isn’t meant to single out Malone, though. As a story published by the Business Journal chain notes, this is part of a wider phenomenon:

Such relationships aren’t unusual in Hollywood, where populist rabble rousers, dreamers and captains of finance long have been united in pursuit of art and profit.

“That’s more the norm than not,” said Michael Taylor, a movie producer, and chairman of film and television production at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Moore’s films have been indictments of broad aspects of American culture: the auto industry in “Roger and Me,” U.S. gun culture in “Bowling for Columbine,” the Bush presidency in “Farenheit 9/11” and the health care system in “Sicko.” The latter three are among the six highest-grossing documentary features in history.

His ability to draw large audiences is why a large media company founded by someone like Malone — who battled regulation to make TCI into a cable TV empire, and whose Libery Media recently started a $50,000 annual prize for journalism covering economic freedom — embraces entertainment without regard to its political viewpoint.

“One of the features, I suppose, of being a titan of industry on that scale is to not micromanage these things and get in the way,” Taylor said.

Yet there is a very big difference between getting in the way and not knowing — or caring — what it is you’re backing.

Fittingly, this week The Economist launched a new business column named “Schumpeter,” after the great economist of entrepreneurship, Joseph Schumpeter. This is timely, because Schumpeter’s dire warning about the future of the free market is one we should always keep in mind. As the column notes:

The prophet of capitalism’s creative powers also understood the precariousness of the capitalist achievement. He pointed out that successful firms depend upon a complex ecology that has been created over centuries. He wrote extensively about the development of the joint-stock company and the rise of stockmarkets. He also understood that capitalism might be destroyed by its own success. He worried that a “new class” of bureaucrats and intellectuals were determined to tame capitalism’s animal spirits.

Today, we can look back and see the rise of that “new class” happening alongside the rise of the state over the last century. Entrepreneurs — Business Journal describes Malone as “libertarian” — should know better than to support the kind of intellecutal poison that seeks to do them in. (Thanks to Margaret Griffis for the LA Times link.)

First, and most importantly, Carafano seems to imply that there is some direct correlation between food production levels and the number of people working in agriculture:

A report prepared for the G8 in April concluded that global food production would need to double by 2050 to keep the world fed. U.S. agriculture will have to be an important part of that increase. Likewise, strong, vibrant rural communities are needed to build sustainable agriculture and protect water, wildlife and other natural resources.

America’s vanishing middle should be of concern to all Americans. Though agricultural workers comprise only about 2 percent of the work force and account for less than 1 percent of GDP, they are at the start of a vast and vital assembly line. American farms are part of a complex industry that processes and distributes food, energy (biofuels) and other products — by some estimates about 20 percent of the economy.

This is a non-sequitur in regard to agricultural production. Fewer people work on farms today because increases in productivity allow fewer workers to produce more. As the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service notes:

American agriculture and rural life underwent a tremendous transformation in the 20th century. Early 20th century agriculture was labor intensive, and it took place on a large number of small, diversified farms in rural areas where more than half of the U.S. population lived. These farms employed close to half of the U.S. workforce, along with 22 million work animals, and produced an average of five different commodities. The agricultural sector of the 21st century, on the other hand, is concentrated on a small number of large, specialized farms in rural areas where less than a fourth of the U.S. population lives. These highly productive and mechanized farms employ a tiny share of U.S. workers and use 5 million tractors in place of the horses and mules of earlier days.

Second, Carafano’s definition of “frontier” seems to rely entirely on population density:

Today, hundreds of counties in the Plains states house fewer than six people per square mile. By 19th-century standards, that was frontier territory.

But Frederick Jackson Turner, whose famous 1893 essay, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Carafano cites at the beginning of his column, didn’t settle on population density alone as a definition:

What is the frontier? It is not the European frontier — a fortified boundary line running through dense populations. The most significant thing about it is that it lies at the hither edge of free land. In the census reports it is treated as the margin of that settlement which has a density of two or more to the square mile. The term is an elastic one, and for our purposes does not need sharp definition. We shall consider the whole frontier belt, including the Indian country and the outer margin of the “settled area” of the census reports.

Much of that “free land” was available in previously unsettled areas, where legal and political institutions were weak, when they were present at all. I would propose such a lack of strong central authority as part of  any sensible definition of “frontier” — a criterion that no part of the U.S. meets today.

Still, the public option is not the worst aspect of the various Democratic health reform proposals, the mandatory purchase requirement is.  Under each of the three bills moving through Congress, every person living in the United States would be required by law to have insurance.  And, if your employer doesn’t provide you with it, you’ve got to buy it yourself or pay a fairly stiff monetary penalty.  What’s more, each of the proposals would eliminate some of the options that are available now — particularly the low-cost insurance plans that cover only catastrophic health events and have substantial cost-sharing features.  And, depending on which bill would eventually be enacted into law, Congress, state insurance commissioners, and/or a federal Health Choices Commissioner would be empowered to determine whether any given plan even “qualifies” as health insurance.  The end result will be higher, not lower costs, for almost every person living in the country.

President Obama knows this, of course.  During the presidential campaign, he roundly criticized Hillary Clinton for proposing essentially the same thing.  As today’s Wall Street Journal points out:

“The political irony here is rich. If liberal health-care reform is going to make people better off, why does it require “a very harsh, stiff penalty” to make everyone buy it? That’s what Senator Obama called it in his Presidential campaign when he opposed the individual mandate supported by Hillary Clinton. He correctly argued then that many people were uninsured not because they didn’t want coverage but because it was too expensive. The nearby mailer to Ohio primary voters gives the flavor of Mr. Obama’s attacks.

And the Baucus-Obama plan will only make insurance even more expensive. Employers will be required to offer “qualified coverage” to their workers (or pay another “free rider” penalty) and workers will be required to accept it, paying for it in lower wages. The vast majority of households already confront the same tradeoff today, except Congress will now declare that there’s only one right answer.”

But that’s not the whole story.  Steven Walker, a co-founder of the patient advocacy group Abigail Alliance, is rightly quoted saying “Patients are right to be angry and frustrated with Richard Pazdur. … He is a dinosaur.”

Indeed, in his zeal to defend Pazdur, Harris gets a few important facts wrong.  For example, he writes that “Federal law requires that the agency demand two ‘well controlled’ trials before approving a drug; in cancer, the Food and Drug Administration is often satisfied with just one.”  Wow, you might think, this Pazdur guy must really be special if he’s willing to disregard federal law in order to speed new drugs to market.  Except that federal law hasn’t required two Phase III trials in all cases since passage of the FDA Modernization Act (FDAMA) in 1997, which specifically permits FDA to approve a drug on the basis of a single Phase III trial if the Secretary of HHS (of which FDA is a part) determines the information sufficient to prove the drug is effective.  Similarly, FDAMA specifically grants FDA permission to “fast track” the approval of important new drugs by considering surrogate end-points rather than increased length of survival.  Pazdur’s contribution was not to come up with these great ideas, but merely to implement them at the request of Congress and President Clinton.

Pazdur looks even less good when you consider some of the products he’s accused of derailing, such as the prostate cancer drug Provenge, which I wrote about two years ago. Provenge works like a vaccine to help a patient’s immune system fight off prostate cancer, a disease with few other available treatments.  The independent panel of scientific experts that advises the agency on new oncology drug approvals unanimously agreed that Provenge was safe, and voted 13 to 4 that it was effective enough for approval, but the agency demanded additional testing before it would approve the drug.  In one trial, 34 percent of patients receiving the drug were alive three years after treatment, compared to just 11 percent of patients receiving the placebo. But the median survival time for those taking Provenge was just 4½ months longer than for the placebo group. Still, Taxotere, the only currently approved alternative for advanced prostate cancer, extends survival for just half that time, while killing some 300 patients outright every year.  FDA’s main contention was that the clinical trial showing these benefits in Provenge was actually designed to find a different end-point.  So, under Pazdur’s leadership, the FDA oncology drugs unit refused to approve Provenge despite pretty reliable evidence of its safety and efficacy.  That story doesn’t make it into Gardiner Harris’s article, however, since it might weaken his case for Pazdur’s sainthood.

Harris does, however, trot out a patient advocate and an industry analyst to make the case that, even safe drugs with uncertain benefits shouldn’t be approved.  “We want drugs that prolong survival, not drugs that just improve a test result,” said Frances Visco of the National Breast Cancer Coalition.  Naturally, we don’t want snake-oil salesmen touting non-existent benefits of sham treatments.  But, why can’t we require full disclosure of the ambiguity, and let patients and their doctors choose?  In far too many cases, waiting for absolute proof of some huge benefit serves only to keep promising new drugs off the market.  It also means that dying patients are refused the only option that might prevent or delay their death.

Harris notes, as a humanizing aside, that Pazdur doesn’t eat meat “because he believes a vegetarian diet will help protect him from cancer, although the supporting evidence is as thin as vegetable broth.”  That’s wonderful; a balanced vegetarian diet certainly can’t hurt, and there is some evidence suggesting that it may well help improve Pazdur’s health.  But, if this dietary choice were subject to the same evidentiary standards that Pazdur places on new drugs, he wouldn’t have that choice.  What seems not to have occurred to Pazdur, Harris, and Pazdur’s other supporters is that, if a drug with uncertain effectiveness is approved, those who “want drugs that prolong survival, not drugs that just improve a test result,” don’t have to use it.  They can hold out for a product with more certain benefits.  But, when a drug with uncertain benefits is not approved, it means that everyone is denied the choice.

In Arlington County, Virginia, there exist twelve restaurants that are required to sell $350 of food per gallon of liquor sold.

Isn’t that weird?

Stranger still, this gang of twelve voluntarily opted in to that bizarre requirement. They think it works better than what all other Arlington restaurateurs have to deal with – sales must be no less than 45% food, and no more than 55% liquor.

Again, what a strange regulation.

The reason for the switch from a dollar to a volume ratio is that Arlingtonians are developing a taste for more sophisticated – and more expensive – cocktails. Restaurants are finding themselves pushing up against that 55% barrier even without serving more drinks.

Jacob, who has thought about opening his own establishment, adds:

“this kind of regulation is one reason among many that I can’t imagine ever opening a bar in Virginia. It would be much smarter to eliminate ratios entirely and simply require that food is available to patrons who want it.”

Way to encourage entrepreneurship, Virginia.

 “Obama challenges Wall Street to support his regulations,” reads the headline of a story from McClatchy Newspapers on Obama’s Monday speech at Federal Hall, opposite the New York Stock Exchange. In the address, Obama asked the audience of Wall Street traders ”to embrace serious financial reform, not fight it.”

But “embracing” Obama’s planned regulation may be easier for the Wall Street audience than meets the eye. This is beause a closer look at new rules Obama is proposing shows that the bulk of them do not go after the Wall Street culprits, but instead Main Street entrepreneurs that had nothing to do with the crisis.

The regulatory “white paper” issued by the Obama administration in June would shower mounds of red tape around job-creating venture capital firms, discount brokerages and the small investors who use them, and the limited banking operations of everyday businesses from discounter Target Stores to motorcycle maker Harley-Davidson.
 
Meanwhile, many of the flawed government policies at the root of the crisis from government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to mark-to-market accounting mandates still have not been fully addressed. He should go after these reforms rather than putting in rules that would burden legitimate investors and entrepreneurs.
 
Among the mandates in Obama’s regulatory reform that would hit Main Street are.
 
1.    The forcing of businesses such as Target and Harley-Davidson to sell off their limited banking operations, or industrial loan corporations
 
For decades, nonbank businesses have been able to set up limited banking operations to issue credit cards and make loans to consumers. These operations, called industrial loan corporations (ILCs) are subject to most of the same as well as some more stringent rules for safety and soundness. Some of the most respected businesses, including Target Stores, Harley-Davidson and Toyota Motor, have set up these ILCs to help lower costs for consumers. Even House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank recently told Bloomberg News that these weren’t a factor at all in the financial crisis — rather the big banking conglomerates were.

Yet Obama’s plan not only continues the unwise moratoriums on new ILCs it would force the existing one to be dissolved or sold off. As Coleman Drake and I write in the Washington Times, such a drastic action could have a dramatic effect in reducing access to credit and jobs in a still fragile economy.
 
2.    Putting an “investment adviser” fiduciary duty on discount brokerages that serve self-directed investors.
 
The Obama plan would put a “fiduciary liability” on many brokerage firms equivalent to the current standard on investment advisers. Many brokers would have to guarantee that investments are “suitable” for certain types of investors and be sued if they are not. But the hallmark of many discount brokers such as Fidelity and Charles Schwab Corp is that many of its customers don’t really want investment advice. They are self-directed investors make their own decision what to buy and sell, and then trade and click on their laptops.
 
Yet the fiduciary standard of care in Obama’s plan could apply even to advice incidental to trading – such as discount brokerage call centers. Charles R. Schwab, the founder of the firm that bears his names and has taken on old-line brokerages to provide discounted trading to individual investors, warned in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that the logical outcome of this mandate “would be that individual investors would be constrained to a small set of plain-vanilla investments – Treasuries for all – or would be forced to pay us a fee to manage their account.”
 
This rule would also miss the mark in terms of preventing fraud. It does not go after those who clearly offer investment advice. Bernie Madoff was a registered investment adviser, yet he passed SEC examinations with flying colors. This could also have the unintended effect of investors doing less due diligence on their investments, which could leave them at greater risk.
 
3.    Venture capital firms could be subject to mounds of regulation for the “systemic risk” they have not been shown to contribute to:
 
Under broad regulations proposed for hedge funds, other investment pools for sophisticated investors could be burdened with red tape. Among these are venture capital firms of the type that gave the crucial seed money to Apple, Google and other Silicon Valley startups that are now among today top tech firms. And these pose less risk than many other investment vehicles.

As James Freeman has written in the Wall Street Journal, “Even if one wishes to be paranoid about systemic risks, it’s hard to imagine how tiny tech companies could be ground zero in a future credit bubble. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac don’t provide cheap financing to VCs.”
 
Conclusion: Wall Street deserves a lot of blame, but so do outdated big-government policies from Washington that were going strong despite the myth of the era of deregulation (I’ve outlined the main factors in this article that ran in Stocks, Futures & Options magazine.).

As CEI President Fred Smith has long urged, President Obama and Congress should sell off and break up the government-backed Fannie and Freddie, which new research shows were not only buying subprime mortgages directly but labeling other subprime mortgages as prime.

They should continue the progress in reforming mark-to-market accounting, which exacerbated the crisis by forcing financial firms to mark down even performing loans and lose capital to lend with. The small mark-to-market reforms put in place in April of this year have helped bring stability back to the banking sector, but the quasi-private Financial Accounting Standards is threatening to re-impose the flawed standard, something lawmakers need to stop.

Also, policymakers should pare back the costly Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the accounting mandates of which did virtually nothing to prevent the financial crisis and are now preventing smaller firms from going public to get the financing they need to build new businesses and new jobs.
 
Policymakers should observe the anniversary of the meltdown on Wall Street by pursuing pro-growth policies that will lead to a rebirth of entrepreneurship on all American streets.

I’ll tell you Norman who.  His biographer, Leon Hesser, called him the Man Who Fed the World.  Science reporter Gregg Easterbrook called him the Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity. I’ve called him a Modern Prometheus.  And comedians Penn and Teller said (well, mostly Penn said) that he was the greatest human being who ever lived.

Norman Borlaug was an American agricultural scientist and plant breeder whose work sparked what is now known as the Green Revolution.  He was recognized with countless scientific and humanitarian awards, including, in 1970, the Nobel Peace Prize. Quite tragically, he died of cancer yesterday, at the age of 95.

Borlaug was born on a small farm in Cresco, Iowa in 1914 and developed an interest in applying science and technology to agriculture during the Depression-era dustbowl that desiccated the Great Plains in the first half of the 1930s.  He went off to study forestry and plant pathology — and compete on the wrestling team — at the University of Minnesota in 1933.  He eventually would complete a Master’s and Ph.D. at the U of M, after brief stints with the U.S. Forest Service that periodically interrupted his studies.  After completing his Ph.D. in 1942, Borlaug worked for two years at DuPont, contributing scientific research for the war effort.

In 1944, Borlaug got the opportunity that would come to define the rest of his life, joining a Cooperative Wheat Research Production Program co-funded by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and the Mexican government.  At the time, corn still made up the vast majority of Mexico’s cereal production, even though wheat had been introduced hundreds of years earlier by Spanish settlers.  The problem was that wheat varieties adapted to Mexican soil and climatic conditions were susceptible to numerous problematic diseases.  Borlaug’s team bred various domestic and foreign wheat varieties together to generate cultivars that would resist most of these diseases, then crossed those long-stem wheat varieties with a semi-dwarf wheat variety from Japan in order to produce an adapted variety with stems that were short and strong enough to hold up the better producing seed heads.

Perhaps Borlaug’s biggest contribution was the development of an accelerated breeding schedule he called “shuttle breeding,” which let him improve the genetic composition of his wheat lines twice as quickly as with normal breeding.  Despite opposition from fellow plant breeders who insisted this couldn’t be done, Borlaug and his team would grow one generation of plants at the higher elevations around Mexico City during the summer, and then grow a second generation at sea level some 700 miles to the north near the Sonoran coast during the winter.  Not only did shuttle breeding work, by doubling the progress of Borlaug’s breeding schedule, it also had the fortunate, but unintended side effect of producing wheat strains that were not sensitive the amount of light received each day, as nearly all other plant breeds are.

In just four years, Mexico went from importing almost all the wheat its people consumed to being self-sufficient in wheat production. Borlaug continued working in Mexico, but by the 1960s, his reputation had spread around the world.  He was called on first to travel to India and Pakistan to help improve wheat production there. And after a stunning success, he went on to the Philippines and China, where his innovative breeding methods were used to raise yields in the rice varieties consumed by roughly half the world’s population.  By the 1980s, Borlaug teamed up with Japanese billionaire philanthropist Ryoichi Sasakawa to try to spread the Green Revolution to Africa.  Wherever he went, the combination of better plant varieties, along with agricultural chemicals such as anhydrous ammonia and other inorganic fertilizers, and synthetic herbicides and insecticides, have helped to more than triple wheat yields in less developed countries since the 1950s.

None of this was easy, however. Borlaug and his colleagues met severe resistance from local seed breeders and farmers set in their ways, as well as national and regional governments who didn’t want to see others succeed where their own programs had failed.  Borlaug wrote in the Foreword to my 2004 book, The Frankenfood Myth, that, “As we created what became known as the ‘Green Revolution,’ we confronted bureaucratic chaos, resistance from local seed breeders, and centuries of farmers’ customs, habits, and superstitions. … At the time, Forrest Frank Hill, a Ford Foundation vice president, told me, ‘Enjoy this now, because nothing like it will ever happen to you again. Eventually, the naysayers and the bureaucrats will choke you to death, and you won’t be able to get permission for more of these efforts.” Indeed, bureaucratic hassles became much worse, he wrote. ”If our varieties had been subjected to the kinds of regulatory strictures and requirements that are now being inflicted upon the new biotechnology, they would never have become available.”

But, perhaps no critics were tougher on Borlaug than western environmentalists.  As Borlaug moved from Mexico to Asia, doomsayer Paul Ehrlich claimed that Borlaug “doesn’t have any idea of the magnitude of the problems in food production.” He said, “You aren’t going to make any major impact on producing the food that’s needed.” And Ehrlich wasn’t alone.  Today, much of the political left still sees the Green Revolution as a failure, despite it’s obvious successes, because it promoted technological tweaks to address the deficiencies of nature, weakened socialist agrarian reform movements of the 1960s and 1970s by improving rural productivity, and permitted the survival of hundreds of millions — perhaps billions — of lives who just end up despoiling the environment.

This failure of the political left, particularly the environmental movement, to acknowledge the usefulness of innovative agricultural technologies led Borlaug to eventually reject the movement he once embraced.  Although he was largely apolitical, one lamentable aspect of Borlaug’s politics was his early belief in the necessity of global population control. But, by the 1990s, Borlaug had a change of heart.  He also became one of the biggest boosters of food biotechnology and one of the biggest critics of those who believe organic agriculture is the only sustainable option. On the 30th anniversary of his Nobel Prize, he said “I now say that the world has the technology — either available or well advanced in the research pipeline — to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology? While the affluent nations can certainly afford to adopt ultra low-risk positions, and pay more for food produced by the so-called ‘organic’ methods, the one billion chronically undernourished people of the low income, food-deficit nations cannot.”

I came to know Norm — and he always insisted that everyone call him Norm — about ten years ago.  He was an energetic, inquisitive, and thoughtful man, and he always spoke with great passion about his own work and that of the countless others whose innovative research he has helped to spread around the world. I had the honor of spending the better part of a week hosting Norm in Washington in May 2004, when CEI arranged for him to give a “newsmaker” speech at the National Press Club.  And, on the occasion of CEI’s 20th Anniversary, we presented him with our first ever Prometheus Award for Human Achievement. Despite being in the presence of one of my very few heroes, I was struck most by Norm’s sheer humility.  I thought it delightful, for example, that, even at 90 years old, the former wrestler still insisted on carrying his own luggage — and Norm seemed like he’d be willing to deck a guy, however well-meaning, for insinuating that he might be so frail as to need his host to carry it for him.

His beloved wife Margaret, an accomplished basketball star in her younger years, died just over two years ago, also at the age of 95. As I wrote then, “It’s not every spouse who will gladly pick up her family and move it to a foreign land, where they will live in modest conditions. [Borlaug had rejected an offer by DuPont to double his salary if he would pass up the position in Mexico.] But, Margaret was a strong and wise woman, and she gladly moved with Norm and their children to Mexico, where they dedicated their lives to helping others by promoting science, technology, and common sense. Her contributions were thus as important to the Green Revolution as almost any other person’s. So, anyone who values freedom and progress owes both Norm and Margaret a great deal of thanks.”

Today, reflecting on Norm’s death, I am reminded of Winston Churchill’s words following the Battle of Britain: “Never was so much owed by so many to so few.”  Indeed, never was so much owed by so many to a single man.  Norman Borlaug will be sorely missed.

Garrett Peck, author of The Prohibition Hangover: Alcohol in America from Demon Rum to Cult Cabernet, walked an audience through the history of Americans’ conflicted relationship with alcoholic beverages (at Jackie’s Restaurant in Silver Spring, Maryland). Moving along in time, the lecture was augmented with drinks that were popular at different times in the nation’s history — including the infamous “coffin varnish,” about which H.L. Mencken wrote.

The “hangover” of prohibition, noted Peck, is the broad — often byzantine — regulatory framework under which alcoholic beverages are now produced, marketed, and sold in the United States. I’ve begun reading the book, which I’m finding enjoyable. And it’s got the best jacket blurb I’ve ever seen (from my friend Edward Stringham): “[T]his book will be of interest to anyone interested in alcohol.”

Peck also lead a Temperance Tour, in which he takes visitors along the historical landmarks that mark the road to the insanity that was prohibition. Here’s a toast to drug prohibition passing into history some day, as well.

Feehery’s line of thinking is that the office deserves respect. Holding one’s tongue is a matter of decorum. “The president is the commander-in-chief, the leader of the country, and in many unspoken ways treated as a king.”

Technically, the president is commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and of nothing else. The rest of his job consists of humbly executing the laws given him by the Constitution and the legislature. That’s why it’s called the executive branch.

Feehery, a partisan Republican, here manages to out-conservative Edmund Burke. Royal rhetoric pervades his piece – evidence of how far the presidency has strayed from its intended purpose. The cult of the presidency endures.

Don Boudreaux’s approach to the presidency is more realistic, if less romantic:

[T]he notion that the U.S. presidency is lofty or respectable in any ethically significant sense is ludicrous. As Saul Bellow said about politicians, “they’re a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of clichés the first prize.”

Hence the real reason to let the president have his say without being heckling him: politicians make themselves look bad far more effectively than any heckler could. He doesn’t need the help. Just take his ideas seriously:

-We can save money by spending $900,000,000,000.

-We can contain costs by isolating people from the costs they incur.

-The Medicare/Medicaid model works. Expand it.

Presidents are unremarkable creatures. Borne of much talent for campaigning and little for governing, more love for power than for principle, and the unyielding belief that they know best, presidents have the worst kind of hubris. This is perhaps their only regal trait.

President Bush thought he could win two simultaneous land wars in Asia, and use military might to build a new nation in Iraq. Hubris.

President Obama thinks he can run the auto, financial, and health care industries at the same time, all while controlling global climate patterns. Hubris.

Feehery is right that President Obama should not have been heckled. If not for the sheer harm his office causes, it would not merit the attention.