So says David Zaring over at the Conglomerate — at least when it comes to the topic of regulation.  I don’t buy it.   Anyway, here’s the complete quote for context…

Read the full piece here. 

Despite the debate raging over whether the $787 billion “stimulus package” passed by Congress in February 2009 worked, the argument is over: the Obama Administration has capitulated. And it was on display in the President’s signing ceremony last week for the next round of federal economic elixirs. No government official dared to call the $18 billion spending package anything but a “jobs bill.”

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The final vote hasn’t even been taken to “fix” the omnibus (or ominous) health care “reform” legislation that President Obama signed into law this week, and already the first volley of the market’s response has been sounded.  Today’s Wall Street Journal Online reports that “Prices of most Treasury notes and bonds were lower after relatively tepid demand … sending the 10-year note’s yield to its highest level since June.”

Read the full piece here. 

Yesterday, Todd predicted that Obamacare will result in greater government involvement in heretofore private decisions that impact health. Since the government is now going to pay (via insurance subsidies) for many more Americans’ health care, it has a much stronger interest in how they live. So do we taxpayers who must pay for the government’s largesse. As Todd explained…

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Ask any conservative what the problem with America is today, and the answer you will get is government spending. But ask that same conservative, or any conservative for that matter, what to do about it, and the shoulders will inevitably shrug. Politicians, including conservatives, simply cannot be trusted when they get control of the purse strings. The problem is a familiar one in law and elsewhere — it is called the pre-commitment problem. Political leaders can promise to cut spending, but can’t resist reneging on the promise when in power; governments can promise not to bail out banks, but know that they must when the manure hits the fan. (For instance, Fannie Mae bonds explicitly disclaimed  any government guarantee, but the bail out of Fannie Mae continues to cost us tens of billions of dollars.)

Read the full piece here. 

The DOJ has posted the transcript from the recent DOJ/USDA hearings on antitrust in agriculture here.  I figured our readers might be especially interested in seeing Christine Varney’s comments (especially without having to slog through all 350 pages to find them!).  I have bolded some of the most interesting parts of her comments.

Read the full piece here. 

Have you ever been tempted to buy a beggar a cup of coffee or a sandwich instead of giving money? If so, you have, like a young Anakin Skywalker, taken your first step to the dark side of altruism. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been there too. The reason I offered food instead of (money for) vodka is because I wanted to “help” the beggar. From my lofty perch (that is, sober, housed, and employed), I wanted to impose my values on him. Like a father choosing broccoli instead of ice cream for his kids, I thought I knew better what was good for the beggar — what he really wanted if only his thought processes were rational.

Read the full piece here. 

Lots of liberals, such as Wall Street Journal columnist Thomas Frank and folks from the Huffington Post and People for the American’s Way’s Right Wing Watch, are all up in arms over the Texas Board of Education’s recent efforts to push Texas’s public school curriculum in a decidedly “conservative” direction. As Todd and Josh noted, the Board recently voted to require high school economics curricula to cover the ideas of free marketeers F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman. The Board also called for curricula to put less emphasis on that godless Thomas Jefferson and more on Protestant reformer John Calvin; to replace the term “capitalism” with “free market system” (apparently on grounds that the former term is often used derisively, as in “You capitalist pig!”); and to include consideration of the “unintended consequences” of a number of such “liberal” initiatives as the Great Society, affirmative action, and Title IX.

Read the full piece here. 

Summary

“Michael Carrier has written a timely and interesting book. There is much to like about the book, in particular its accessible format and content. I do fear that it is a bit overly ambitious, however, hoping both to educate the completely uninitiated as well as to develop a more advanced agenda, and at times it reads like two separate books. I suppose related to this criticism are my more detailed comments, which perhaps distill down to this: The book repeatedly and appropriately canvasses both sides of some pretty heated debates, nicely presenting the most basic arguments, and suggesting if not saying that these are matters about which we are profoundly uncertain. Nevertheless, with what seems to me to be little support (and with only essentially anecdotal empirical support), Carrier then chooses sides.

For example, the concept of the innovation market is contentious and unsettled. Carrier presents truncated versions of both sides of this debate and then summarily votes in favor of innovation markets, slyly offering to confine the analysis to pharmaceutical industry mergers, but nevertheless offering a “framework for innovation-market analysis.” Frankly, the framework strikes me as little more than a stylized merger analysis under the Guidelines, with a “Schumpeterian Defense” thrown in for good measure (but extremely limited, and essentially the same as the traditional failing firm defense). I see little here to suggest that the innovation market analysis, even as styled by Carrier, will do much effectively to incorporate dynamic efficiency concerns into antitrust. And there are other examples. I would have preferred to see a book that went into far greater depth in defending these sorts of choices among uncertain alternatives.”