Russell Roberts's Blog, page 1539

Something's gotta give

Missouri voters have voted against the federal mandate in ObamaCare requiring everyone to buy health insurance.

Not surprisingly, they like their current health care more than ObamaCare.

The problem is that the current health care system is not sustainable. The American people need to eat spinach. But Obama sold health care reform as if it were chocolate cake. It's not. It's spinach and a particularly distasteful kind of spinach and most people realize it. Strangely enough, people prefer...

Dedicated to Muso

Here's a letter, to the Wall Street Journal, in the spirit of my late friend Manuel Ayau:

You report that "The Obama administration is promising labor unions that it will enforce a range of worker protections in new trade pacts in an effort to win labor's support of a revised South Korea free-trade agreement" ("Obama Courts Labor Support for Trade Deal," August 4).

Translation: "The Obama administration is promising labor unions that it will raise the obstacles that poor foreign workers...

Worth a thousand words

It's more than a picture, actually. It's a subtle and beautiful graph. On one axis is per-capita income. On the other is life expectancy. Each point on the graph is the life expectancy and per-capita GDP for a particular year in two different countries, Cuba and Portugal. The data are from 1959 to 2009.

Starting in 1959, Portugal and Cuba have about the same life expectancy but Cuba about 25% more prosperous than Portugal. After 50 years of communism, life expectancy has gone up dramatically (...

Manuel "Muso" Ayau (1925-2010)

Early this morning, one of my great heroes died.  Manuel Ayau – founder of Guatemala's remarkble Universidad Francisco Marroquin – lost his brief fight with cancer.

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I'm rather choked up now.  Muso – as he was affectionately called – became my and Karol's good friend over the years.  He possessed a love of life, a sense of humor, an optimism, an entrepreneurial drive, and an understanding of – and love of – liberty that are combined in so few people as perfectly as they were combined and...

Some Links

Fred Douglass details Paul Krugman's battle with commentors at Krugman's blog, The Conscience of a Liberal.  (HT Lyle Albaugh and Todd Cerami)  By the way, when I read that Krugman admits to being unfamiliar with public-choice literature, I was reminded of a long-ago lunch that I had with a Cornell University economist.  A fine economist, this Cornell don nevertheless – in response to a lunch-time remark of mine – rejected public-choice economics out-of-hand.  "It's just a rationale for...

Income-Earning Man

Here's a letter to the Los Angeles Times:

Like Michael Smith, I don't suffer from the "Progressive" itch for income equality (Letters, Aug. 3).  Not only does achievement of such "equality" require the state to treat people unequally, obsession with income equality also reflects a Scrooge-like fetish for money.

Consider a man who spends long hours at the gym.  He does so for the same reasons that another man spends long hours at work: to gain an advantage and a sense of achievement.  Are...

Successful Bailout?

Here's a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Paul Ingrassia is too quick to declare Uncle Sam's recent bailout of G.M. and Chrysler "an unexpected success" ("Two Cheers for the Detroit Bailout," August 2).  First, the passage of a year-and-a-half isn't long enough to justify drawing any such inference from the reversal in these firms' income statements.

Second – and more importantly – the chief economic case against the bailout was not that huge infusions of taxpayer funds and special...

Some Links

In this Pittsburgh Tribune-Review op-ed, Bob Higgs explores the recent anemic creation of private-sector jobs.  Here's his closing line:

Unfortunately, anemic private employment tempts politicians to intervene even more in the economy, heightening the uncertainty and discouraging investors further in a vicious cycle.

Writing in last Sunday's Washington Post, Thor Halvorssen dissects the ruthless Hugo Chavez – and helps to rescue the reputation of Simon Bolivar.

Bruce Yandle worries about Uncle...

Even King George II had an Official 'Bugg Destroyer' to Shoo Bugs from his Palaces' Furniture and Curtains

Here's a letter to the Los Angeles Times, followed by a reprise of a post from 2004:

John Crowther is correct that Benjamin Franklin's world "was vastly different from today's world" (Letters, August 1).  But that world was different in the opposite way that Mr. Crowther imagines.

Contrary to Mr. Crowther's suggestion, the 18th century was not less polluted than the 21st; it was vastly more polluted.  Human excrement and other environmental hazards were a part of everyday life in the 18th...

All Costs are the Subjective Expected Values of Foregone Opporunities

Here's a letter that I sent yesterday to news-radio radio station WTOP (in DC):

During yesterday's 1:00pm hour, you played recordings of several listeners who offered their thoughts on U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan.  One gentleman insisted that on matters of national defense "costs should be irrelevant."

Sounds noble.  In fact, though, it's childish and dangerous.  The cost of any action is the value of that action's alternative.  So to ignore costs – as this caller proposes – is to...