On behalf of everyone here at Civitas, I want to thank all our readers for making this such a great year for Red Clay Citizen and for Civitas. This month we broke another record for unique visitors, and we hope to continue the trend going into 2008. In usual New Year’s Eve fashion, here is our countdown of the top stories of the year:
1) Former House Speaker Jim Black (D) Goes to Prison on Bribery and Corruption Charges
2) The Drought (but thanks to God for the Christmas gift of rain)
3) The Expansion of Publicly Financed Campaigns — Tied for Third — with the Expansion of Taxpayer-subsidized Health Insurance for Families Who Earn $60,000-plus
4) The Medicaid Swap
5) Community Colleges Forced to Admit Illegal Immigrants
6) The Defeat of the Transfer (and Sales) Taxes
7) The Nonemergence of a Presidential or Gubernatorial Frontrunner from either Party
The Goodyear Incentives Deal
9) Publication of the Civitas Institute Public Policy Series and the Launch of Civitas’ Citizen Legislature (… shameless self-promotion here)
10) The Continued Underperformance of the “Education” Lottery
Send us any other items you think merit inclusion — or better yet, let us know what your own top 10 list is.
Happy New Year!
Interesting idea from Singapore: make government more flexible with wages, pay, and performance. (I’d add, of course, cost-cutting incentives.)
-Max Borders
Soros and other guilt-ridden ex-hedge-fund speculators are putting big bucks behind their favorite big government candidates. (More here.)This is about corporate interests backing horses as much as ideology.
Expect no less from the likes of Z. Smith Reynolds and the Fletcher Foundation here in North Carolina. What a titanic war. What a titanic waste of resources.
Just think if all this political money went to social entrepreneurship — rather than who gets to run the bureaucracies.
-Max Borders
Moral hazard and overconsumption are huge problems in healthcare. Don’t believe it? Here’s your New Year’s book — NYTimes calls it the best economics book of 2007. Yes the NYTimes.
I’m starting to think that Paul Krugman is so enamored with being a darling of the left, that he has forgotten – or perhaps abandoned – even the fundamentals (law of comparative advantage). Boudreaux pits him against himself again:
Paul Krugman worries that, although trade between high-wage countries is mutually beneficial, "trade between countries at very different levels of economic development tends to create large classes of losers as well as winners" – and so is suspect because it likely harms ordinary American workers (“Trouble With Trade,” December 28).
A famous trade economist argues that this concern is misplaced. In a 1996 essay, this economist – responding to a protectionist who worried that western trade with low-wage countries would harm workers in the west – wrote that this protectionist "offers us no more than the classic ‘pauper labor’ fallacy, the fallacy that Ricardo dealt with when he first stated the idea, and which is a staple of even first-year courses in economics. In fact, one never teaches the Ricardian model without emphasizing precisely the way that model refutes the claim that competition from low-wage countries is necessarily a bad thing, that it shows how trade can be mutually beneficial regardless of differences in wage rates."
Oh – the economist who wisely warned against the pauper-labor fallacy is none other than Paul Krugman.*
-Max Borders
What is wrong with all you North Carolinians? Do you not know there are needy children out there in our state depending on you to buy lottery tickets so they can have Pre-K, scholarships and school buildings?
According to this article, the Lottery folks are begging people to buy tickets. They are even dispatching sales representatives to lottery outlets (gas stations) around the state trying to convince people to plunk down $20 for the second installment of the $1 million raffle.
"Fill ‘er up with Regular, grab me a Diet Pepsi, a Moon Pie and a hand full of them there raffle tickets, please."
Lottery officials are shocked, shocked I tell you, that people aren’t willing to shell out the cash for lottery tickets right after Christmas. I guess we’re all just selfish and don’t really care about the chil’ren, right?
Sky falling? Nah. Onward and upward.
-Max Borders
As the New Year approaches, RCC will be warming back up. But expect only light posting. Till things are back in full swing, try random tidbits:
Arnold Kling on his version of global warming skepticism.
Tyler Cowen on taking Ron Paul seriously.
Ryan Beckwith on more Randy Parton schlock (and Big gubment Republican McCrory and Munger’s new do).
and… Me in the Fayetteville Observer offering zany ideas for your Xmas stocking.
-Max Borders
OK, so they (IPCC modelers) tell us the earth’s "fever" (average global tempurature) is going to keep going up. But it’s not. And it hasn’t since 2001. What gives?
-Max Borders
From Grace Marie Turner:
AHIP … released a survey yesterday of the individual health insurance market, showing that it is healthier than commonly believed. Yes, people can have trouble buying coverage, especially if they have pre-existing conditions, but fewer than the media would have us believe. And these more difficult cases are the ones that the new AHIP proposal is designed to help.
But the survey shows that insurance generally is more affordable in the individual market than through the workplace: Nationwide, average annual premiums were $2,613 for singles and $5,799 for families, half the cost of the average job-based policy.
Premiums varied greatly by state and were highly correlated with the rules set by the state governing premiums, coverage, and underwriting. The heavier the burden, the more costly the insurance. When will states figure out that their "solutions" have been a big part of the problem? Maybe it’s time for a little cooperation with the insurance industry.
-Max Borders