The Future of Capitalism

An essay by the former governor of Florida, Jeb Bush, about focusing the conservative movement on growth and opportunity is now up online:

We have, for too long, been the party of "slow down." Today, we must be the party of "hurry up."
We must stand for radical reform and experimentation.

Disability Nation

May 17, 2013 at 7:16 am

NPR takes an extended, skeptical, and very well done look at the disability benefits system:

The federal government spends more money each year on cash payments for disabled former workers than it spends on food stamps and welfare combined….
In Hale County, Alabama, nearly 1 in 4 working-age adults is on disability. On the day government checks come in every month, banks stay open late, Main Street fills up with cars, and anybody looking to unload an old TV or armchair has a yard sale.
Sonny Ryan, a retired judge in town, didn't hear disability cases in his courtroom. But the subject came up often. He described one exchange he had with a man who was on disability but looked healthy.
"Just out of curiosity, what is your disability?" the judge asked from the bench.
"I have high blood pressure," the man said.
"So do I," the judge said. "What else?"
"I have diabetes."
"So do I."…

Richard Epstein on ObamaCare

May 14, 2013 at 8:46 am

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's column this week is about the difficulties in implementing ObamaCare. He writes:

In this sorry state of the world, the only short-term mechanism that could stop the general blood-letting is a much-needed reversal that pushes back all the key dates for running the plan. The respite in question should not be used only to iron out the difficulties in securing the needed coverage. It should be used to update the information base to decide whether the ACA, on which billions have already been squandered, is so unsustainable that it should be scrapped in its entirety.

Commencement Advice for the Class of 2013

May 13, 2013 at 9:09 pm

The commencement speech members of the Class of 2013 probably won't hear, but that I wish had been given when I graduated, is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at Reason here and at Newsmax here.

Ryan's Kristol Lecture

May 13, 2013 at 3:11 pm

The chairman of the House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan, gave the Irving Kristol Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute May 8. AEI has now posted Mr. Ryan's remarks as prepared for delivery, and they are worth a look for those interested in the question of the post-2012 direction of the Republican Party or the conservative movement. The talk is titled "Conservatism and Community."

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Overpaid College Presidents

May 13, 2013 at 1:26 pm

An economist at Ohio State University, Richard Vedder, has an article up at Bloomberg View about how to tell if a college president is overpaid.

The New York Times has some numbers, including the $984,647 that the president of Ball State University earned.

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A Lemon of a Bill

May 10, 2013 at 1:29 pm

Sometimes what drives legislation in Washington is not partisanship or principle but just constituent service.

An example appears to be the Citrus Disease Research and Development Trust Fund Act of 2013. The New York Times has a glancing mention of it in an above-the-fold front-page news article today headlined "Citrus Disease With No Cure is Ravaging Florida's Groves."

The Senate bill is introduced by Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, and co-sponsored by Senators Boxer and Feinstein, Democrats of California. The House bill is sponsored by Rep. Vern Buchanan, a Republican, and co-sponsored by 21 Democrats and 19 Republicans — all from the citrus-growing states of Texas, California, Florida, and Arizona.

IRS Apologizes For Targeting Conservative Groups

May 10, 2013 at 12:45 pm

How's this for an Associated Press/Washington Post headline: "IRS apologizes for inappropriately targeting conservative political groups in 2012 election."

Well, at least they apologized. It will be interesting to see if they will reimburse the groups for the legal and accounting and other costs of complying with the inappropriate scrutiny. Somehow I doubt it.

They Came For Crook

May 9, 2013 at 12:43 pm

Clive Crook's Bloomberg view column criticizing Paul Krugman, which we excerpted and linked earlier here, has elicited a ferocious response, including one from a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, Brad DeLong, who, as Mr. Crook summarizes the matter in a follow-up column, posted an item that "exemplifies the intemperance I'm addressing. He illustrates it with a picture of a clown. He also wants me fired. 'Bloomberg has some house-cleaning to do,' he says -- charming, and from a tenured academic, to boot."

Charming, indeed.

Smoking at the Met

May 9, 2013 at 12:32 pm

A New York Times dispatch on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's annual costume gala reports:

Don't take this as approval, but you can tell it's a wild party when people who normally sneak away to smoke in the bathrooms are now smoking openly inside the galleries, even though Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was there (or at least he had been earlier).

It will be interesting to see whether Mayor Bloomberg and his administration come down as hard on the Met as they would on a small business that showed similar disregard for the city's anti-tobacco regulations. If the Museum gets away with no consequences, it sure looks like a double standard.

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Imagine That!

May 8, 2013 at 10:27 am

From a New York Times article about the fall-off in recent performance by the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers:

Kleiner has held a series of status-report meetings with its outside investors this year, acknowledging that recent fund performance "wasn't great," one attendee said. "They really believed green tech was going to be the next big technology wave," this investor added.

I'm not a big fan of anonymous sources, but this line made me chuckle. The ranks of those who "really believed green tech was going to be the next big technology wave" included not only Kleiner Perkins but also President Obama and lots of other investors both private and governmental. There were plenty of journalists, too. That the Times can now admit in a front-of-the-business-section news article that this view was incorrect is a big deal.

That's not to say that no one made any money on this stuff, or to say that no one ever will. But it wasn't as easy or as sure a thing as it seemed at the time.

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Langone, Barbour Talk Education

May 7, 2013 at 2:51 pm

"No matter how hard they try to intimidate us," the chairman of the Manhattan Institute, Paul Singer, said last night, "we will not back down."

The event was the Institute's annual Alexander Hamilton Dinner in Midtown Manhattan. Those attempting the intimidating were identified by Mr. Singer generally as defenders of the status quo, but given the context of a recent American Federation of Teachers report that put money managers whose personnel donated to the Manhattan Institute on a "watch list," it wasn't hard to imagine what he meant.

No backing down at all was evident in the remarks of the two main speakers at the event, Invemed CEO Kenneth Langone and the former governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour.

Said Mr. Langone, who was honored at the event with the Alexander Hamilton Award: "We need to hold our teachers accountable....They are being paid a fortune and very frankly the results aren't there....We are not getting the results from our teachers for what we are paying."

Richard Epstein Versus the Pope

May 7, 2013 at 8:23 am

Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's latest column is up at the Hoover Institution's Defining Ideas website. In it, he writes about the collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh in which hundreds of workers were killed:

Bangladesh does not need to pass new laws to deal with the situation. It needs only to enforce expeditiously and uniformly the safety rules currently on the books, by immediately shutting down any building not in compliance with minimum safety standards. The credible threat of a shut down should have an instant effect on factory safety.

The Plausibility Plague

May 6, 2013 at 5:17 pm

The Plausibility Plague — the problem of pundits assuring readers that some outcome is impossible — is the topic of my column this week:

Anyone who has ever suggested a bold policy adjustment, whether it is a change in monetary policy or the elimination of a cabinet department, is familiar with this phenomenon. Instead of addressing the actual merits of an idea, people prefer to just dismiss it as implausible, as if that ends the discussion. The result is an artificially constrained public policy debate biased toward the status quo.
But if there's anything that history teaches, it is that what seems implausible in prospect often seems inevitable in retrospect.

Please check the full column out at Reason (here) and at Newsmax (here).

review of Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right: What American Can Learn From the Strange Genius of Texas

May 3, 2013 at 5:08 pm

The recent opening ceremonies for the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas were a reminder of, among other things, the outsize influence the Lone Star State has had on the rest of America.

Texas gave the United States not only George W. Bush and his father George H.W. Bush, but also Lyndon Johnson, Sam Rayburn, Phil Gramm, Tom DeLay, and Ron Paul. The computer company Dell is based there, as is Whole Foods Market. Texas's abortion laws and a Texas plaintiff who opposed them gave rise to the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade.

Erica Greider reminds us of all this in her new book Big, Hot, Cheap and Right: What American Can Learn From The Strange Genius of Texas. She has an eye not just for the historically significant fact but also for the telling cultural detail — she mentions a Fort Worth restaurant that listed a chicken-fried steak on its menu as "on the lighter side," and a Houston plastic surgeon who had his home swimming pool built in the shape of an augmented breast.