In a Wall Street Journal article titled “The Great Philanthropy Takeover” Arkansas based writer David Sanders reports on a recent conference of the nationwide Council of Foundations in his home state. Sanders’ article aligns with Michael Miller’s blog of July 30 “Healthcare – Don’t Forget The Morality Of It” and deserves your attention because of the author’s conclusion that the Obama administration “is beginning to nationalize another sector of the American economy.”

Read more on Greeks Bearing Gifts…

Samuel Gregg, director of research at the Acton Institute, reflects on business ethics in his recent commentary.  Gregg explores the presence of business ethics courses in business schools; however, with the large presence of business ethics courses we still have a lack of ethics present in business.  The lack of ethics in business became a major factor in our current financial crisis.  Gregg further explains that business is not just about management or the business ethics that are taught, but businessmen and women need to also learn stewardship:

Read more on Acton Commentary: The Problem with “Business Ethics”…

In his commentary, Matt Cavedon, communications associate at the Acton Institute, addressed new taxes that are being proposed to combat the high obesity rates in the United States and to provide financial support for health care reform.  The new taxes proposed to help fund health care reform will begin to tax what Congress deems junk food or unhealthy food.  Cavedon exposes the hypocrisy fostered by taxes on such junk or unhealthy food:

Read more on Acton Commentary: Tax aims to take a bigger bite out of junk food junkies…

Now that the saga of Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Officer James Crowley has moved to the back-burner, let’s look at three less obvious lessons from Skip and Jimmy’s not-so-excellent adventure.

Read more on What can we learn from Gates-gate?…

One of the main arguments for nationalized health care is a moral argument: Health care is a right and a moral and just society should ensure that its people are taken care of–and the state has the responsibility to do this. Bracketing for the time being whether health care is actually a right or not–it is clearly a good, but all goods are not necessarily rights–whether the state should be the provider of it is another question.

Read more on Healthcare–Don’t Forget the Morality of It…

The Radio Free Acton crew is back in the studio! On today’s broadcast, Dr. Donald P. Condit and Dr. Kevin Schmiesing join our host Marc VanderMaas for a discussion of the ins and outs of the US health care system. Dr. Condit gives us some background on how the current system came into being, the problems associated with it, and the pitfalls of the current healthcare reform proposals in Washington.

Read more on Radio Free Acton is Back / Perspectives on Health Care Reform, Part 1…

The argument from federalism: One of the great benefits of federalism is that the states can act as the laboratories of democracy. If a new public policy is tried in the states and works (as happened with welfare reform in Michigan and Wisconsin), then a similar program has a good chance of succeeding at the national level. The welfare reform went national and proved to be one of the most successful public policy initiatives of the last half century. On the other hand, major governmental healthcare initiatives have been tried in Tennessee and Massachusetts. Neither of those have panned out. That should be a cautionary sign to avoid rushing ahead to just get a bill done!

Read more on Five Simple Arguments Against Government Healthcare…

Spurred on by listening to and reading Samuel Gregg, I’ve been making my way through Wilhelm Ropke’s A Humane Economy which is really a special book.

The following passage (on p. 69) really caught my attention with regard to our current situation:

Read more on Wilhelm Ropke for Today…

[update below] British physician Theodore Dalrymple weighs in on government healthcare and “the right to health care” in a new Wall Street Journal piece. A few choice passages:

Where does the right to health care come from? Did it exist in, say, 250 B.C., or in A.D. 1750? If it did, how was it that our ancestors, who were no less intelligent than we, failed completely to notice it?
…
When the supposed right to health care is widely recognized, as in the United Kingdom, it tends to reduce moral imagination. Whenever I deny the existence of a right to health care to a Briton who asserts it, he replies, “So you think it is all right for people to be left to die in the street?”

Read more on Dalrymple on “the right to healthcare”…

The Public Discourse recently published my article, Rethinking Economics in the Post-Crisis World. Text follows:

In the wake of the financial crisis, we need an economics with greater humility about its predictive power and an increased understanding of the complicated human beings who, when the discipline is rightly understood, lie at its center.

Apart from bankers and politicians, few groups have received as much blame for the 2008 financial crisis as economists. “Economists are the forgotten guilty men” was how Anatole Kaletsky, former economics editor and current editor-at-large for the London Times, put it earlier this year when explaining why “a bank with just $1 billion of capital [would] borrow an extra $99 billion and then buy $100 billion of speculative investments.”

Greed and sheer imprudence played a role, but so too, Kaletsky argued, did those (unnamed) economists who posited that their models proved that events such as the collapse of Lehmann Brothers in 2008 or Long Term Capital Management in 1998 were mathematically likely to happen once every billion years.

Kaletsky’s broader point was that contemporary mainstream economics had been sufficiently discredited by the financial crisis that the entire discipline required what he called an “intellectual revolution,” or it risked being dismissed as a rather suspect sub-branch of statistical analysis and mathematical modeling.

Kaletsky is hardly alone in arguing that economists need to rethink key aspects of their discipline. Though unwilling to call for a total paradigm shift, the Economist recently opined that the financial crisis has raised profound questions of coherence about two areas of economics: macro-economics and financial economics. “Few financial economists,” the Economist observed, “thought much about illiquidity or counterparty risk, for instance, because their standard models ignore it.” Likewise, the Economist commented, “Macroeconomists also had a blindspot: their standard models assumed that capital markets work perfectly.”

All this is certainly true. But the key expression to note here is “their standard models.” Read more on Public Discourse: Rethinking Economics in the Post-Crisis World…