This quote is from an opinion piece in today’s WSJ by Martin Feldstein. His thesis is that Obamacare is designed to achieve cost savings through rationing of health care.
In the British national health service, a government agency approves only those expensive treatments that add at least one Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY) per £30,000 (about [...]

Columnist Peggy Noonan’s latest, Common Sense May Sink ObamaCare, suggests that voters have been asking themselves questions regarding the direction of healthcare reform in its current form.
I think the plan is being slowed and may well be stopped not by ideology, or even by philosophy in a strict sense, but by simple American common sense. [...]

So said British historian Robert Payne of the United States of America in 1949. Now, over 60 years later, I wonder if this was written at the peak of our national power and that we’ve been declining ever since. What do you amateur historians think? What other societies or nations might be in competition for [...]

That alliterative title I owe to today’s Peggy Noonan column in the Wall Street Journal, Lessons From the Recovery of 2001. The subtitle is “Not so long ago, there were heroes on Wall Street.”
Noonan tells about how the New York Stock Exchange got itself back on its feet in only 5 days after the towers [...]

This photo was shamelessly snatched from Peggy Noonan’s latest opinion piece, Mere Presidents. In about two weeks we will be back to having only one President of the United States. I will miss this interregnum with its President for foreign policy and another for domestic policy. Strangely enough, it seems to work pretty well.
Ms. Noonan [...]

On November 21, I rashly promised to opine about how the global economy got so screwed up that it is causing a lot of pain. I’m not smart enough, so I won’t try to analyze and explain. What I can do, perhaps, is to look at things from a more personal level since it is [...]

I don’t know either, but for a grisly perspective click on the image to the left.
OK, have you digested that? (Maybe ‘digest’ was a poor choice of words.) As son Larry would say, Edward R. Tufte would love that graphic. (Tufte wrote two classic books entitled, “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” and “Envisioning Information.”
But [...]

PAUL INGRASSIA in today’s Wall Street Journal commented about a Detroit talk show host who asked “whether Michigan, as well as the car companies, should get assistance. The state is being hit by an economic hurricane, he said, just as New Orleans was hit by a natural hurricane.”
Huh? Will the victimology myth never end? Hurricane [...]

Blogging economist Arnold Kling has this interesting outlook on the purpose of free elections:
I continue to view elections as an opportunity for voters to provide a check against politicians. Instead, if you view it as an opportunity to elect a great leader, you are falling into the trap of what Daniel Klein calls “the people’s [...]

Exactly a year ago I contributed to a micro-finance loan to Boris Puero Candela, owner of Puero y Asociados in Ecuador to help finance his computer business. The loan was paid back over 18 months, so I selected another business to help finance.