Studying Confirmation Bias Tends to Convince People of the Existence of Confirmation Bias
If you were a federal contractor with millions of dollars in federal business, would you ever say that federal regulations are too burdensome? Would you tell a newspaper that you violated federal rules by turning away workers because a federal database reported a discrepancy between the information you submitted and the information the government holds?
I don’t think so.
But on National Review’s “The Corner” blog, Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies takes a federal contractor’s self-serving statements about E-Verify as evidence that it’s “working fine.”
Of course it is! If you carefully consider the evidence you want to!
Filed under: Telecom, Internet & Information Policy; Trade and Immigration
Three Felonies a Day
Harvey Silverglate’s new book, Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, is receiving a good bit of press. L. Gordon Crovitz has a good piece up at the Wall Street Journal discussing federal overcriminalization and how it impacts information technology. National Review Online has an audio interview with Silverglate discussing how federal law often strays from traditional notions of criminal intent, making innocent activity potentially criminal.
Silverglate will be speaking at Cato on Thursday at a book forum with Tim Lynch. Tim’s recent book In the Name of Justice looks at the evolution of strict liability statutes and other developments in criminal law with chapters from prominent legal thinkers. Washington Times columnist Tony Blankley will be serving as guest moderator. Admission is free; registration information is available here, and the event can be watched live at the link.
Evidence, Please?
A couple of days ago the Common Core State Standards Initiative released a new draft of its national, “college- and career-readiness” math and English curricular standards. The content of the standards isn’t of huge interest to me — the biggest dangers are in the implementation of standards, not the drafting — but what is of great interest is determining whether having national standards makes sense in the first place. Unfortunately, it appears that many standards fans couldn’t care less about that little concern.
To satisfy my interest, I’ve been delving into empirical work that might back claims that national standards are necessary for educational success, or just that they improve academic outcomes. And what have I found? As I laid out in a recent National Review Online op-ed, and argue today on the New York Times‘ “Room for Debate” blog, there’s hardly any such evidence. There is scant good research on national standards, and what there is largely ignores serious questions about the confounding impact of such factors as culture and changing educational attitudes.
This dearth of research explains why national standardizers are almost totally silent about evidence and instead defend their proposals with soundbites about high expectations for all kids, or the ”craziness” of having 50 state standards. It also explains why they seem to be in a big hurry to get standards drafted, and why the Obama administration is already dangling billions of dollars in front of states to get them to “voluntarily” adopt whatever the CCSSI produces. Quite simply, were the public to find out that national standards are essentially an untested drug being slipped down their throats, they might object. And nothing, it seems, is more important to the national standards crowd than ensuring that that doesn’t happen.
Filed under: Education and Child Policy; General; Government and Politics
Bagram, Habeas, and the Rule of Law
Andrew C. McCarthy has an article up at National Review criticizing a recent decision by Obama administration officials to improve the detention procedures in Bagram, Afghanistan.
McCarthy calls the decision an example of pandering to a “despotic” judiciary that is imposing its will on a war that should be run by the political branches. McCarthy’s essay is factually misleading, ignores the history of wartime detention in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, and encourages the President to ignore national security decisions coming out of the federal courts.
More details after the jump.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
Presidential Cults
Glenn Greenwald, author of Cato’s much-discussed paper on the success of drug decriminalization in Portugal, writes about cults of presidential personality. He notes that Jay Nordlinger of National Review and other conservatives — not to mention a few libertarians — have criticized the Obama administration’s plan to broadcast a presidential speech into American schools and push teachers to post Obama quotes in their classrooms and encourage students to talk about how President Obama inspires them.
Greenwald never actually defends the Obama plan. But he does argue that conservatives have short memories when they say that this is something unique. In particular, he reminds us of the notorious Monica Goodling’s questions to job candidates at the George W. Bush Department of Justice, such as “[W]hat is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?” And also of White House political aide Sara Taylor, who told the Senate Judiciary Committee, “I took an oath to the president, and I take that oath very seriously.” Committee chairman Patrick Leahy had to ask her, “Did you mean, perhaps, you took an oath to the Constitution?”
Greenwald has a good point. Both the red and blue teams have been far too quick to succumb to a cult of presidential personality. (And really, swooning over Reagan or Obama is sort of understandable. But George W. Bush? You have to wonder if they worked really hard at creating a Bush cult because there wasn’t really much there.)
But I do see one difference: The Obama administration is trying to push its president-worship onto 50 million captive schoolchildren (not to mention using the NEA to enlist the nation’s artists in promoting Obama and his agenda). Goodling was asking people looking for government jobs why they wanted to “serve George W. Bush.” Now, sure, they should want to serve the public interest — and she was asking these questions to people seeking career legal positions as well as to political appointees. Still, it seems a smaller bit of cultishness than going into every public school.
Gene Healy wrote about cultishness by both Bush and Obama supporters here.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Government and Politics
Have Mexican Dishwashers Brought California to Its Knees?
An article published this week by National Review magazine blames the many problems of California on—take a guess—high taxes, over-regulation of business, runaway state spending, an expansive welfare state? Try none of the above. The article, by Alex Alexiev of the Hudson Institute, puts the blame on the backs of low-skilled, illegal immigrants from Mexico and the federal government for not keeping them out.
Titled “Catching Up to Mexico: Illegal immigration is depleting California’s human capital and ravaging its economy,” the article endorses high-skilled immigration to the state while rejecting the influx of “the poorly educated, the unskilled, and the illiterate” immigrants that enter illegally from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America.
Before swallowing the article’s thesis, consider two thoughts:
One, if low-skilled, illegal immigration is the single greatest cause of California’s woes, how does the author explain the relative success of Texas? As a survey in the July 11 issue of The Economist magazine explained, smaller-government Texas has avoided many of the problems of California while outperforming most of the rest of the country in job creation and economic growth. And Texas has managed to do this with an illegal immigrant population that rivals California’s as a share of its population.
Two, low-skilled immigrants actually enhance the human capital of native-born Americans by allowing us to move up the occupational ladder to jobs that are more productive and better paying. In a new study from the Cato Institute, titled “Restriction or Legalization? Measuring the Economic Benefits of Immigration Reform,” this phenomenon is called the “occupational mix effect” and it translates into tens of billions of dollars of benefits to U.S. households.
Our new study, authored by economists Peter Dixon and Maureen Rimmer, found that legalization of low-skilled immigration would boost the incomes of American households by $180 billion, while further restricting such immigration would reduce the incomes of U.S. families by $80 billion.
That is a quarter of a trillion dollar difference between following the policy advice of National Review and that of the Cato Institute. Last time I checked, that is still real money, even in Washington.
Lowry on the “Mad Dash” to Pass ObamaCare
From National Review editor Rich Lowry’s column for King Features Syndicate:
As with the stimulus package, Obama’s health-care plan depends on speed. More important than any given provision, more important than any principle, more important than sound legislating is the urgent imperative to Do It Now.
Do it now, before anyone can grasp what exactly it is that Congress is passing. Do it now, before the overpromising and the dishonest justifications can be exposed. Do it now, before Obama’s poll numbers return to Earth and make it impossible to slam through ramshackle government programs concocted on the run. Do it now, because simply growing government is more important than the practicalities of any new program…
Obama cultivated an image of cool during the campaign. Unrattled. Deliberate. Cerebral to a fault. Who knew he’d be in a panic to remake one-sixth of the economy by the first week of August of his first year in office?
Normally, the larger and more complicated a bill is, the longer Congress takes to consider it. With the stimulus and cap-and-trade, Obama and the Democrats upended this rule of thumb by passing byzantine, 1,000-page bills that no one had the time to read. When the work product is indefensible, deliberation is dangerous.
There’s a touch of the guilty conscience about Obama’s terrible rush. As if he knows he was elected as a moderate-sounding deficit hawk last year, and if he’s going to pass an ambitious left-wing program, he must do it before the opposition builds.
He Is the Very Model of a Modern Right-Wing Foreign Policy Thinker
Jim Lobe points us to the thoughts of Andrew McCarthy, a fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, on Barack Obama’s reticence to urge other people to spill their blood in Iran. A few choice bits below:
“The fact is that, as a man of the hard Left, Obama is more comfortable with a totalitarian Islamic regime than he would be with a free Iranian society.”- “The divergences between radical Islam and radical Leftism are much overrated — ‘equal rights’ and ’social justice’ are always more rally-cry propaganda than real goals for totalitarians, and hatred of certain groups is always a feature of their societies.”
- “It would have been political suicide to issue a statement supportive of the mullahs, so Obama’s instinct was to do the next best thing: to say nothing supportive of the freedom fighters.”
- “It’s a mistake to perceive this as ‘weakness’ in Obama. It would have been weakness for him to flit over to the freedom fighters’ side the minute it seemed politically expedient. He hasn’t done that, and he won’t. Obama has a preferred outcome here, one that is more in line with his worldview, and it is not victory for the freedom fighters. He is hanging as tough as political pragmatism allows, and by doing so he is making his preferred outcome more likely. That’s not weakness, it’s strength — and strength of the sort that ought to frighten us.”
As Lobe notes, this prompted a rare “that’s over the line” type response from National Review editor Rich Lowry, but McCarthy is having none of it. Instead, McCarthy says that by no means were his earlier remarks out of bounds, and argues that Obama is going to transform the United States into the sort of country that the Islamic Republic will be fond of.
That’s the sort of calm, reasoned debate we’ve come to expect from the establishment Right. I’m trying to think, which conservative thinker does this sort of thing finds its lineage in? Burke? Kirk? Carl Schmitt? It’s tough to say.
Just Say No to Public Option Health Care
In today’s New York Times, Paul Krugman writes about the necessity of a public option in health care. Why is a public plan such a bad idea? I explain in my post over at The Corner:
A public plan, regardless of how it was structured or administered, would have an inherent advantage in the marketplace over private insurance companies because it would ultimately be subsidized by American taxpayers. It would also have an advantage since its enormous market presence would allow it to impose much lower reimbursement rates on doctors and hospitals, similar to current reimbursement practice under Medicare and Medicaid. It is estimated that privately insured patients presently pay $89 billion annually in additional insurance costs because of cost-shifting from government programs. Assuming the new public option would have similar reimbursement policies, it would result in additional cost-shifting as much as $36.4 billion annually. This would force insurers to raise their premiums, making them even less competitive with the taxpayer-subsidized public plan.
With the public option squeezing private insurers from the sides, and expanded eligibility for Medicare and Medicaid pushing from the top and bottom, it is unlikely that any significant private insurance market could continue to exist. America would be firmly on the road to a single-payer health care system with all the dangers that presents.
McCarthy Does Petraeus a Disservice
General Petraeus recently gave an interview to Fox News. Petraeus speaks approvingly of the decision to close Guantanamo, limiting interrogation to the techniques in the Army Field Manual, and how adherence to the Geneva Conventions takes propaganda fodder out of the hands of our enemies.
Andy McCarthy attacks Petraeus over at National Review Online’s The Corner:
With due respect to Gen. Petraeus, this is just vapid. To begin with, he doesn’t identify any provision of the Geneva Conventions that we have actually violated – he just repeats the standard talking-point of his current commander-in-chief that we took “steps that have violated the Geneva Conventions” during those bad old Bush days. What steps is he talking about? How about naming one?
McCarthy then uses the brief reference to the Geneva Conventions to attack strawman arguments as if Petraeus wanted to give full Prisoner of War status to Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters and had just proposed ending military detention of combatants picked up on the battlefield.
I’m pretty sure that Petraeus is not squeamish about keeping detainees in custody. As CENTCOM Commander, he’s got over 600 of them in Bagram.
When you watch the video it’s pretty clear that Petraeus was referring to the treatment of detainees and the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” as violating the Geneva Conventions, a position consistent with his previous statements. Petraeus doesn’t supply a specific provision to satisfy McCarthy, but he is likely thinking about Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions of 1949. This provision bans, even in a conflict of a non-international nature (read: counterinsurgency and counterterrorism), cruelty, torture, and humiliating and degrading treatment.
McCarthy is also broadly dismissive of the propaganda effect that Guantanamo has had in encouraging people to take up arms against US forces. This sentiment is counter to the doctrine that I learned in the Special Forces Detachment Commander’s Qualification Course. Low-level insurgencies and terrorism are driven by propaganda.
To build an insurgency, you don’t need to win battles. You need to take a few shots at your enemy and tell stories about how successful you were, even when you weren’t. Over time you get sympathetic parties to join your struggle and gain critical mass to move into outright guerrilla warfare.
To sustain a worldwide terrorist organization, you don’t need to actually pose an existential threat. You need to prod a superpower into deploying large troop formations into the Muslim world, where they can be entangled in local disputes over local grievances. Usama bin Laden is not the commander-in-chief of any significant armed force, but he can be the inciter-in-chief who makes broad claims about opposition to America. He tries to link local insurgencies to his global caliphate narrative even where they are not supportive of his broader goals. Check out David Kilcullen’s book, The Accidental Guerrilla, for a detailed discussion. Incidentally, Kilcullen worked for Petraeus as a senior counterinsurgency advisor in Iraq.
This is the propaganda war we are fighting, and most everyone agrees that we have not been doing it very well. Every time we drop a bomb in Afghanistan, the Taliban beat us to the punch with exaggerated (and mostly false) claims of civilian casualties. US forces are now reviving body count reports to counter Taliban propaganda. While I don’t think that body counts are a good metric for success in the long run, trying to be an honest broker of good and bad information blunts enemy propaganda.
McCarthy is wrong to mischaracterize Petraeus’ words and dismiss the propaganda war where we have largely been a punching bag. Cheerleading our military leaders who produce gains on the ground but dismissing the fundamental insights that produced their success is willful blindness.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
Obamacare to Come: Seven Bad Ideas for Health Care Reform
President Obama has made it clear that reforming the American health care system will be one of his top priorities, and congressional leaders have promised to introduce legislation by this summer.
In a new study, Cato scholar Michael D. Tanner breaks down the key components of any plan likely to emerge from Congress, and explains how those proposals would “dramatically transform the American health care system in a way that would harm taxpayers, health care providers, and — most importantly — the quality and range of care given to patients.”
At National Review online, Tanner explains the different aspects to Obama’s plan, all of which could be coming to a hospital near you. In today’s Cato Daily Podcast, he expands on his paper, describing what health care will look like in years to come.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Health, Welfare & Entitlements
Rush Limbaugh Is Not the Problem
Brink Lindsey’s post, triggered by Jerry Taylor’s controversial critique of conservative talk radio at National Review online, is part of a much-needed debate about the changes needed to create more fertile soil for limited-government — a task that is especially difficult given the GOP’s decade-long embrace of statist economic policy.
But in the spirit of friendly disagreement, the problem is not Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Talk radio, after all, existed when Republicans were riding high and promoting small government in the 1990s.
The real problem is that today’s GOP politicians are unwilling to even pretend that they believe in limited government. In such an environment, it is hardly a surprise that anti-tax and anti-spending voters decide that talk show hosts are de facto national leaders.
This does not mean that Rush Limbaugh is always right or that Sean Hannity never engages in demagoguery. But I suspect if any of us had to be live on the air three hours every day and support our families by attracting an audience, our efforts to be entertaining might result in an occasional mistake – either factually or rhetorically. Heck, when I had to be on the air for just one hour each day in the mid-1990s for the fledgling conservative television network created by the late Paul Weyrich, I’m sure I had more than my share of errors.
This being said, I agree with Brink’s main points about conservatism being adrift. How come there were no tea parties when Bush was expanding the burden of government? Why didn’t conservative think tanks rebel when Bush increased the power of the federal government? Where were the supposedly conservative members of the House and Senate when Bush was pushing through pork-filled transportation bills, corrupt farm bills, a no-bureaucrat-left-behind education bill, and a massive entitlement expansion?
I sometimes wonder if the re-emergence of another Reagan would make a difference, but Brink (and Posner, et al) offer compelling reasons to believe that the problems are much deeper.
The Closing of the Conservative Mind
If you’re unclear what’s wrong with conservatism these days, I urge you to check out the tragicomic dustup accidentally provoked last week by my colleague Jerry Taylor at National Review Online’s “The Corner” blog.
I don’t want to give a blow-by-blow recount of the fracas, but happily a convenient compendium of the relevant links is provided here. Go read the whole thing; you’ll be entertained, that’s for sure. For present purposes, suffice it to say that Jerry made two basic points: (1) talk radio hosts Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are not popular outside the conservative movement; and (2) the two have a habit of making “dodgy” arguments even when their positions are sound. He might have added that the sky is blue and A comes before Z. For his effrontery Jerry was verbally beaten to a pulp by his fellow Cornerites.
The whole thing seems like an updated version of the Emperor’s New Clothes, except this time the crowd turns on the truth-telling kid and gives him the Rodney King treatment. And that response to Jerry’s innocent and obvious points captures the essence of what has gone wrong with the conservative movement. That the flagship publication of the movement will brook no criticism of demagogic blowhards like Limbaugh and Hannity says it all: A movement founded on the premise that “ideas have consequences” has suffered a calamitous decline in intellectual standards.
Richard Posner agrees. In a recent blog post, he offered this withering assessment of the state of the conservative mind:
My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of managment and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.
By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.
I don’t endorse every detail of Posner’s bill of indictment, but the broad thrust is correct. Movement conservatism has regressed to something like the days before National Review was founded — back when Lionel Trilling could say that conservatism consisted of nothing but “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” And as Jerry’s trip to the woodshed demonstrates, those gestures can be very irritable indeed! Conservatism today has degenerated into a species of especially unattractive populism, pandering to the pro-torture-and-wiretapping, anti-gay-and-Mexican prejudices of a dwindling, increasingly sectarian, increasingly regional “base.”
Some who sympathize with libertarian and free-market causes are cheered by the anti-government rhetoric and Tea Party theatrics now increasingly in evidence on the right. Perhaps, they think, the old Goldwater-Reagan conservatism is making a comeback. Sorry, but I seriously doubt it. On the contrary, I worry that good free-market ideas are going to get tainted by association with an increasingly brutish identity politics for angry white guys and the women who love them.
In order to make gains for the cause of limited government, we need to convince smart people that we are right. We need to win the battle of ideas in the intellectual realm by making better arguments than our opponents, and we need to educate the public so that it is less susceptible over time to “rational irrationality.” None of this can be accomplished by consorting with and apologizing for merchants of intellectual junk food, or by making common cause with some of the ugliest cultural attitudes in contemporary America. Greater economic freedom will not come with pitchforks and torches; it will come, as it has in the past, by reshaping the elite consensus.
New at Cato
- David Rittgers speaks out on the O’Reilly Factor about the government’s policy on torture.
- At National Review online, Patrick Michaels weighs in on Earth Day.
- Will Wilkinson warns of problems with Obama’s budget on Marketplace.
- Richard Rahn explains why the current tax system needs to be overhauled and replaced in The Washington Times.
- In Wednesday’s Cato Daily Podcast, Swaminathan Aiyar discusses the future of the dollar.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; General; Government and Politics
Who’s Blogging about Cato
Here’s a round-up of bloggers who are writing about Cato research and commentary:
- National Review’s Mark Hemingway quoted Ilya Shapiro about the 9th Circuit Court of Appeal’s recent decision on gun laws. He also posted David Boaz’s reaction to the New York Times blog that stated that Cato has been “remarkably silent on bailouts.”
- QandO’s Michael Wade offered his own thoughts on the New York Times blogger who said Cato’s voice against bailouts has not met her “expectations of adequate noise.”
- Blogging about high-speed rail, The Reason Foundation’s Samuel Staley cited Randal O’Toole’s study, High-Speed Rail: The Wrong Road for America.
- At The New Republic’s “The Plank” blog, James Kirchick discussed last week’s Cato event, “Left Turn? South Africa after the Election.”
- The Atlantic’s Clive Crook reviewed the new Cato book, The Beautiful Tree, which explains how private education efforts are empowering children in Third World nations.
- Blogging on Tax Day, Jacob Grier cited Charlotte Twight’s essay in Cato Journal on the history of income tax withholding in the United States.
Demand for Subsidies
My op-ed on National Review Online today provided new information about the increasing number of federal subsidy programs. The federal welfare state is expanding rapidly.
One friendly reader emailed me:
Ever cross your mind that there’s a reason government programs increase over time? I’ll clue you in: Programs increase because of public demand.
It’s not rocket science, people want more services. Period. Somebody’s got to pay for them. Hences taxes. Or perhaps borrowing. Or a combination of both. In any event, there’s no evidence people are willing to get along with fewer services.
The situation seems simple to me; so why can’t you ideologues on the far right understand what’s going on. Instead, you simply go on bemoaning the existence of programs and taxes you don’t like.
There are numerous problems with this reader’s views, including constitutional problems. But one thing that strikes me is the underlying assumption of the “public interest theory of government,” or the idea that democracies and bureaucracies operate to efficiently provide “services.”
In reality, there are structural problems in government that bias policymakers toward fiscal irresponsibility, as our current $1.8 trillion federal deficit indicates. The issue is not ideology, it is scientific: Does the government actually work as the optimists, like this reader, believe? I think the empirical evidence is in on that question.
Filed under: Government and Politics; Political Philosophy; Tax and Budget Policy
There Ain’t No Such Thing as Market-Based Universal Coverage
Over at The Corner, Harvard Business School professor and Manhattan Institute scholar Regina Herzlinger urges conservatives to support universal coverage — but in a market-oriented way. That is an absurdity. Once the government adopts a policy of universal health insurance coverage, a free market is impossible and the casualties begin to mount.
As a model, Herzlinger points to Switzerland, “which enables universal coverage without any governmental insurance through this system.” Switzerland requires all residents to purchase “private” health insurance; dictates the content of that insurance; and dictates the price. As I explain in a recent Cato paper, once the government controls those decisions, you’ve got socialized medicine.
My colleague Mike Tanner observes that the Swiss government’s power to control the content of “private” health insurance allows special interests to lard up people’s health insurance with their services — whether Swiss consumers want them or not:
The expansion of benefits has driven up the cost of insurance…As Uwe Reinhardt has noted, “Over time, the growth in compulsory benefits has absorbed an increasing fraction of the consumers’ payment, thus compromising the consumer-driven aspects of the Swiss system.”
Tanner also reports that the government’s power to dictate health insurance premiums is harming the sickest Swiss:
Evidence shows that the community rating requirements are…leading to the over-provision of care to the healthy and the under-provision of care to the sick. In addition, the prohibition on risk management discourages the development of new and innovative products.
In this Cato paper, University of Chicago business school professor John Cochrane explains how such price controls harm sick patients and suppress innovative new products.
Herzlinger is an extremely passionate and knowledgeable advocate of market-based health care. But when it comes to universal coverage, readers of National Review are better counseled by the magazine’s editors, who write:
to achieve universal coverage would require either having the government provide it to everyone or forcing everyone to buy it. The first option, national health insurance in some form or other, would either bust the budget or cripple medical innovation, and possibly have both effects. Mandatory health insurance, meanwhile, would entail a governmental definition of a minimum package of benefits that insurance has to cover…
Republicans should go in a different direction, proposing market reforms that make insurance more affordable and portable. If such reforms are implemented, more people will have insurance.
Some people, especially young and healthy people, may choose not to buy health insurance even when it is cheaper. Contrary to popular belief, such people do not cause everyone else to pay much higher premiums. Forcing them to get insurance would, on the other hand, lead to a worse health-care system for everyone because it would necessitate so much more government intervention. So what should the government do about the holdouts? Leave them alone. It’s a free country.
Herzlinger is correct that “it is 2009, not 1992.” If we want America to remain a free country in 2009 and beyond, we must reject universal coverage.
Filed under: Cato Publications; General; Health, Welfare & Entitlements
Who’s Blogging about Cato
- Writing on National Review’s blog, John Hood cites Michael New’s recent op-ed, “The Right Way to Bail out California” and William Poole’s new article on the Fed’s massive expansionary policies.
- While running an online poll on Sanjay Gupta’s appointment, Ann Althouse quotes Michael D. Tanner on his views about the office of surgeon general.
- Jason Shafrin cites a December Cato forum in which panelists Glen Whitman and Ezra Klein debated the state of the nation’s health care. A podcast from the forum, “Does America’s Health Care Sector Produce More Health?” is available here.
- Insider Online contributor Alex Adrianson blogs about the most recent edition of Cato Journal, with an article by J.R. Clark and Dwight R. Lee that examines the relationship between government interference in the market and censorship.
- Brad Warbiany, a writer for The Liberty Papers, cites Tad DeHaven’s recent post arguing against increased government spending.
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