In terms of the unforeseeable and destructive effects of government regulation, it’s difficult to find a better example of a time bomb: it was set in 1934 to explode in $147 billion (about $239 billion in 2008 dollars) of damage 55 years later.[8] Then, to top it all off, the free market received the blame! While the establishment Left is certainly horrible on the issue of housing, the Right has its own shameful legacy as well. FULL ARTICLE

Slate on how to get a supposedly better cup of coffee for a lower price at Starbucks. Here.

declares Newsweek.

It’s a mystery—even to the number crunchers. “We’d like to say it’s because economics is so interesting and because economists are so handsome and intelligent,” says John Siegfried, an econ professor at Vanderbilt University. “But there’s no good answer.”

Sure, Siegfried. Of course the Austrian School is by far the sexiest because we don’t bore the gals with dry discussions about econometrics.

The super bulls are back. Apparently they weren’t optimistic enough with this or this.

Interesting report on Bill Frist’s sale of HCA shares.

Insider knowledge?
For years, Frist was criticized for holding HCA stock while directing legislation on Medicare reform and patient issues. His office has consistently deflected criticism by noting that his assets were in a blind trust and not under his active control.

However…

Frist traded using only public information, and only to eliminate the appearance of a conflict of interest, Stevenson said.

Interesting how the desire to eliminate appearance of conflict of interest just suddenly arose so close to a one-year high in share price. We just know he’ll realistically end up in prison, then maybe confined to his home with an ankle bracelet on. We can certainly bet on that for a powerful Republican, right?

(BTW, my point is about disparity in enforcement, NOT that Frist or inside traders should be punished.)

Of course there’s still some problems with this analysis, but it’s a pretty good start.

With regard to one of my earlier posts, maybe this calls for some optimism that they will eventually figure out who really owns the Fed.

The poor Associated Press. It attributes the fall in prices to an increase in demand on the part of college students, but that would raise prices (assuming supply relatively constant).

It is competition and increasing efficiency on the supply side that have reduced the price of laptops (VCRs, DVD players, and so on) and thus made laptop purchases attractive to more and more students, not the reverse. This is the market at work to make yesterday’s luxuries available to the masses. (At the end AP does make a brief concession to supply factors, but still makes it clear it doesn’t understand the long-term, free-market process.)

No wonder journalists are such statists. They don’t even understand the basic supply-demand model covered in the first two weeks of ECON 101.

Price controls have a decent shot of working this time, so we’re told, because the central planners have based the caps on an index of five-day averages of spot rates in three mainland markets (L.A., N.Y., and Gulf Coast).

That should do the trick. These guys are so clever. I wonder why the market never thought of this? (Wink, wink).

says the MSNBC “Answer Desk.”

Well I’m relieved to find this out, and also to learn from the “Answer Desk” that the Fed is a valiant inflation fighter.

I guess the bright side of all this is that now it may be easier to rid ourselves of the Fed…or maybe not.

What chain of events led to “free” Americans having less in the way of health choices under some circumstances than “unfree” socialist Europe? In Europe, silicone implants are not only available but much more popular than their saline counterparts, because patients and physicians both believe they look and feel more natural. So how did our health choices get usurped by a petty, arbitrary government body? What chain of events led to “free” Americans having less in the way of health choices under some circumstances than “unfree” socialist Europe? FULL ARTICLE

Apropos of the discussions of intellectual property here of late.

(I was hoping to see discussion of this story last week here or on LRC’s blog, but better late than never.)

The overstepping labels have now angered Steve Jobs, which is not a good sign. All of this could end with completely anonymous file sharing where file sharers can’t be identified and sued. Then the labels will only have themselves to blame for a failed attempt to cartelize P2P systems.

This article suggests that there is still plenty of money in touring for hot artists, despite the alleged fall in returns from recording sales.

Fascinating column here on the “puzzling” rise in short-term interest rates and decline in long-term rates.

At least he offers some alternative “gloomy” theories behind our flattening yield curve, but ends on this:

All this attests to our economic ignorance. There are no simple rules (budget deficits, for instance) to explain interest rates. My view is that low interest rates are mainly a good sign. They reflect not only low inflation—but growing confidence that it will stay low. We may be reverting to the 1950s, when this was the norm. In 1959, the rate on the 10-year Treasury bond averaged 4.33 percent. This is a reassuring notion; but it could also be wrong.

“Red light cameras do not increase safety,” says Eric Scrum with the National Motorists Association. “Quite frankly, they are not a solution in any shape or form.”
***
Studies by the Federal Highway Administration show right angle crashes decreased by 25 to 30 percent, but rear-end crashes increased by about 15 percent.

Here.

Don Boudreaux posted an interesting blog entry at Cafe Hayek (forwarded to me by two different e-mailers who wanted a response) with a link to a New York Times article quoting Columbia economist Frank Lichtenberg as stating, “In general, the benefits of new drugs outweigh the costs by a substantial margin.”

Call me a little skeptical of this last statement (leaving aside the question of whether Lichtenberg’s econometric analysis really supports such a conclusion and how relevant it is to the U.S. today).

There was a fascinating article in the Dec. 8, 2003 UK Independent on drug efficacy. It is now only available via paid access, so here are two passages (and a reprint):

For years, the drugs industry has grown fat on a myth – the false belief that all drugs will work on just about everybody…Yet it has been an open secret within the drugs industry that most drugs do not work for most patients, a secret that has now been publicly aired for the first time by Allen Roses, the head of genetics at GlaxoSmithKline, Britain’s biggest drugs company….

But even when a drug has been approved in terms of safety and “efficacy” – whether it does what the label says it should do – few people realise just how poorly they perform in real life. Dr Roses cited a study published three years ago by Brian Spear, a senior scientist at Abbott Laboratories, a medical diagnostics company in Chicago, on the efficacy rates of a range of different drugs. It found that drugs vary enormously in terms of how well they work, with efficacy rates varying from as low as 25 per cent for cancer drugs to 80 per cent for painkillers. For many drugs, however, the efficacy rates hover around 50 per cent or lower, meaning that, for most people, these drugs just don’t work. As Dr Roses puts it: “The vast majority of drugs – more than 90 per cent – only work in 30 or 50 per cent of the people.”

My article of June 11 received a tremendous response and letters continue to come in. Mises.org and many other readers passed along and requested a response to an article appearing in Barron’s on June 14 dealing with the same topic but from an opposing view. Other than satisfying reader requests, the other reason for what follows is that the Mises Institute stands almost completely alone in its support of true health freedom, but what that entails deserves more coverage and exposition. (In contrast, the Cato Institute has thrown its support to reforms such as “decentralized Medicaid” and vouchers.) [Full article]

Mises was once asked what one institution gives evidence that a society has crossed into socialism from capitalism or vice versa. Mises answered clearly and without hesitation: the presence of a stock market. This indicated a toleration for private ownership and exchange and it provides the essential means to compare the worthiness of investment projects by a common denominator of prices. With such markets, calculation was possible, and so was prosperity. [Full article]

The American Medical Association (AMA) was founded in 1847 around two propositions: one, all doctors should have a “suitable education” and two, a “uniform elevated standard of requirements for the degree of M.D. should be adopted by all medical schools in the U.S.” In the days of its founding AMA was much more open–at its conferences and in its publications–about its real goal: building a government-enforced monopoly for the purpose of dramatically increasing physician incomes. It eventually succeeded, becoming the most formidable labor union on the face of the earth. [Full Article]