On Health Care, State Doesn’t Know Best
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on May 17th, 2012 11:08 pm by HL
On Health Care, State Doesn’t Know Best
Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe
Prices were out of control at the end of third-century Rome, and the Emperor Diocletian was determined to rein them in. In AD 301 he issued his famous Edict on Prices, a complex piece of legislation that banned speculation and established price ceilings for a wide range of goods and services. But the ambitious law failed. Though violators could be punished with death, inflation and speculation persisted. Goods were hoarded, or sold on the black market. The economic crisis worsened. Eventually the law was abandoned. Like countless rulers before and since, Diocletian discovered the hard way…
Believing in Obama
Charles Blow, New York Times
You gotta have faith. Democrats have it. Republicans don't. That is the finding of a USA Today/Gallup poll that was released on Tuesday. The poll found that:
Occupy Movement, RIP
Walter Russell Mead, The American Interest
Remember when Occupy Wall Street was sweeping the nation? The media branded it the left's answer to the Tea Party, the start of a grand national mobilization; depending on who you ask, half of America once supported the OWS protestors, double the amount who back the Tea Party. The Huffington Post even launched a separate page devoted entirely to coverage of OWS.How the mighty have fallen. The New York Times may still be trying to perform mouth to mouth resuscitation on the decomposing OWS corpse, attributing continuing policy influence sans evidence of any kind to a movement that has…
Is There a Drone in Your Backyard?
Andrew Napolitano, Reason
Earlier this week, the federal government announced that the Air Force might be dispatching drones to a backyard near you. The stated purpose of these spies in the sky is to assist local police to find missing persons or kidnap victims, or to chase bad guys.If the drone operator sees you doing anything of interest (Is your fertilizer for the roses or to fuel a bomb? Is that Sudafed for your cold or your meth habit? Are you smoking in front of your kids?), the feds say they may take a picture of you and keep it. The feds predict that they will dispatch or authorize about 30,000 of…
Europe’s Fate, and Obama’s, May Ride on G8
Alexis Simendinger, RCP
President Obama has a weekend challenge ahead of him: Can he persuade European leaders gathered in the Maryland woods outside Washington, D.C., to adopt the U.S. fiscal example of short-term bailouts, government stimulus and long-range plans for belt-tightening in order promote growth and stave off a fiscal meltdown in the Eurozone?Obama's re-election chances, pinned to his promises of a rosier U.S. economy and more jobs here, could ride on what his peers in Europe decide to do.U.S. economists have said continued writhing in Europe over a solution to the debt crisis, and even…
