Even Secretariat Understood Death Tax’s Cruelty - Deroy Murdock - National Review Online

Saw this movie this weekend. Loved it.

Read more here.

Reason.tv: Peter Thiel on Facebook, Technology, and the Higher Education Bubble - Hit & Run : Reason Magazine

Betting On The Gold Standard? Odds Are Still Long : NPR

Betting On The Gold Standard? Odds Are Still Long : NPR

Health Care and Socialist Calculation, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty

Health Care and Socialist Calculation, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty

O.K., You Fix the Budget - NYTimes.com

O.K., You Fix the Budget - NYTimes.com

The Last Boom Town in America

Imperial Athens. Imperial Rome. Imperial Washington. Centers of power and, therefore, money. Power is Washington's product, and the more power it has, the more money it attracts.

As Washington gains power and wealth, it grows as an obstacle to production and innovation in the rest of the nation. Silicon Valley is just outside of San Francisco. LA produces world-class entertainment. What does Washington produce? Very little that does not depend on spending other people's money and telling them how to live.

As my hero Bastiat might have said, Washington is no longer a town that uses law to protect men and their property, it uses law to plunder both.

Why is Washington now home to 7 of the 10 richest counties in the United States? Because it is better to be the plunderer than the plundered.

World Bank Chief Riles Up Economists By Talking Gold Standard

Standard? What's a standard?

World Bank Chief Riles Up Economists By Talking Gold Standard - Agustino Fontevecchia - Moral Hazard - Forbes

Science? Politics? Both?

"This group feels strongly that science and politics can't be divorced and that we need to take bold measures to not only communicate science but also to aggressively engage the denialists and politicians who attack climate science and its scientists," said Scott Mandia, professor of physical sciences at Suffolk County Community College in New York.

"We are taking the fight to them because we are … tired of taking the hits. The notion that truth will prevail is not working. The truth has been out there for the past two decades, and nothing has changed."

Read more.

Progress Q & A

"China has also pulled off a breathtaking economic transformation which will soon see it become the mightiest economic power in the world. It will challenge American hegemony as never before in modern times."

Read more: John Humphrys, in the Daily Mail

Question: How did China pull off its breathtaking economic transformation?

Answer: By encouraging markets more and using government less.

Question: How might a country pull off a breathtaking economic decline?

Answer: By doing the exact opposite.

Post Election Humor

Politics: That Which Is Seen

Why do we spend so much time talking about politics and elections?

The vast majority of the really important decisions that we make as try to improve our lives have nothing to do with who wins and who loses elections. The technological innovations that will change our lives don't, either.

In fact, the work that makes the world better doesn't occur in legislatures. It occurs in homes, offices, factories, and all the other places where individuals trade what they know with each other.

Unfortunately, all that trade is too small to matter. It's not big enough, splashy enough, or noisy enough to get attention.

Politics is everything that trade is not. Politics is big, splashy, and noisy. We can see politics, whether we like it or not. In an election year, we can't avoid it.

Trade is almost invisible.

It's easy to overestimate the importance of something that is all about overstating its importance.

Attack Ads, Circa 1800

Via Reason.tv

The Power to Tax

According to the 2011 "Business Tax Climate" published by the Tax Foundation:

1. Worst state in the union for business taxes: New York.

2. Best state in the union for business taxes: South Dakota.

3. Most improved: Illinois.

4. Heading down fast: New Mexico.

5. At risk: Washington State

Full report here.

Just Don't Say No, Sometimes

Life is too short to say no to every cheeseburger you meet, even if your name is Michelle Obama.

You Know I'm Right

Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, anchor and reporter at CNBC; discusses her new book, You Know I'm Right.

Beware the Intellectuals

So one of the lessons of our century is: Beware the intellectuals. Not merely should they be kept well away from the levers of power, they also should be objects of peculiar suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice. Beware committees, conferences, leagues of intellectuals! For intellectuals, far from being highly individualistic and nonconformist people, are in fact ultra-conformist within the circles formed by those whose approval they seek and value. This is what makes them, en masse, so dangerous, because it enables them to create cultural climates, which themselves often generate irrational, violent and tragic courses of action.

Paul Johnson, "The Heartless Lovers of Humankind"

Their Righteous Cause

"The greatest evils inflicted upon humanity have been the work of those who are so confident of their efforts to do good that they do not hesitate to use the instruments of evil available to them on behalf of their righteous cause."

Vincent Ostrom

Patient Capitalism

Consumer Protection

This is a story about consumer abuse.

A consumer signs a contract he is told will make his life better. He pays $60,000 per year for three years, and ends up unhappy with the results. The promises of the original contract remain unfulfilled. He asks for his money back. He is denied.

The product? A law degree. The promise? A job. The response? You've got to be kidding. We don't give anybody their money back. What do you think this is, a business?

Read more here.

The Biases of Bureaucrats

"[While] there is a lot of interest in the psychology and neuroscience of markets, there is much less in the psychology and neuroscience of government. Slavisa Tasic, of the University of Kiev, wrote a paper recently for the Istituto Bruno Leoni in Italy about this omission. He argues that market participants are not the only ones who make mistakes, yet he notes drily that "in the mainstream economic literature there is a near complete absence of concern that regulatory design might suffer from lack of competence." Public servants are human, too.

Mr. Tasic identifies five mistakes that government regulators often make: action bias, motivated reasoning, the focusing illusion, the affect heuristic and illusions of competence."

Matt Ridley, in the Wall Street Journal