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John Stossel starts us off today reacting to the World Health Organization’s ranking of the U.S. as 37th in quality of health care.
The New York Times recently declared “the disturbing truth … that … the United States is a laggard not a leader in providing good medical care.”
As usual, the Times editors get it wrong.
They find evidence in a 2000 World Health Organization (WHO) rating of 191 nations and a Commonwealth Fund study of wealthy nations published last May.
In the WHO rankings, the United States finished 37th, behind nations like Morocco, Cyprus and Costa Rica. …
… So the verdict is in. The vaunted U.S. medical system is one of the worst.
But there’s less to these studies than meets the eye. They measure something other than quality of medical care. So saying that the U.S. finished behind those other countries is misleading. …
American Spectator thinks NY Times might be channeling Hayek.
Readers of the New York Times got a front-page example recently of what F.A. Hayek called “the fatal conceit” — the idea that some great mind or committee can do a better job than the private market in organizing and directing an economy.
Hayek argued that the market automatically coordinates the millions of individual activities in an economy by way of “natural, spontaneous and self-ordering processes of adaptation to a greater number of particular facts than any one mind can perceive or even conceive.”
The record of the past century shows that the system that delivers the goods, reduces scarcity and improves living standards is the “spontaneous human order created by a competitive market,” said Hayek, not the “deliberate arrangement of human interaction by central authority based on the collective command over available resources.”
What works, in short, is freedom and capitalism, not statism and socialism. …
… The Times article that supports Hayek’s line of reasoning — “Caps on Prices Only Deepen Zimbabweans’ Misery,” by Michael Wines — provides a perfect illustration of how the “fatal conceit” of government can turn a difficulty into a catastrophe.
“Robert G. Mugabe has ruled over this battered nation, his every wish endorsed by Parliament and enforced by the police and soldiers, for more than 27 years,” explained Wines. “It appears, however, that not even an unchallenged autocrat can repeal the laws of supply and demand.” …
American Thinker says Hugo Chavez is the next ignorant thug to wave a magic wand.
Hugo Chavez is moving the clock in Venezuela forward by 30 minutes, in the name of reshaping Venezuelans’ metabolism. The New York Times reports:
Moved by claims that it will help the metabolism and productivity of his fellow citizens, President Hugo Chávez said clocks would be moved forward by half an hour at the start of 2008. He announced the change on his Sunday television program.
The mini-version of Daylight Savings Time apparently will be year-round. Evidently el presidente is persuaded that this will have Venezuelans getting up earlier on the solar clock, which he believes will affect their metabolisms. …
Ilya Somin in Volokh posts again on how the drug war harms our efforts fighting fundamentalist Islamist fascists.
Time and again, on this blog, I have warned that the War on Drugs is undermining the War on Terror in Afghanistan (see here, here, here, and here). As I explained in earlier posts, it does so in three separate ways: By diverting valuable resources away from military missions to poppy eradication; by creating a black market that provides the Taliban with the lion’s share of its income; and by antagonizing rural Afghans who then start to support the Taliban or at least become less likely to provide valuable assistance and information to NATO and Afghan government forces. …
Walter Williams shows how liberal opinions create black victims.
… Blacks are not only the major victims of homicide; blacks suffer high rates of all categories of serious violent crime, and another black is most often the perpetrator.
Liberals and their political allies say the problem is the easy accessibility of guns and greater gun control is the solution. That has to be nonsense. Guns do not commit crimes; people do.
Up through 1979, the FBI reported homicide arrests sorted by racial breakdowns that included Japanese. Between 1976 and 1978, 21 of 48,695 arrests for murder and non-negligent manslaughter were Japanese-Americans. That translates to an annual murder rate of 1 per 100,000 of the Japanese-American population. Would anyone advance the argument that the reason why homicide is virtually nonexistent among Japanese-Americans is because they can’t find guns?
The high victimization rate experienced by the overwhelmingly law-abiding black community is mostly the result of predators not having to pay a heavy enough price for their behavior. They benefit from all kinds of asinine excuses, such as poverty, racial discrimination and few employment opportunities. …
Don Boudreaux’s fortnightly column wonders if government intervention in the credit markets is a good idea.
… The most famous such intervention is Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Still commonly regarded as saving America from the Great Depression, this spasm of interventionist government did no such thing.
On the eve of entering World War II in 1941, America’s economy was still quite depressed — as it had been for more than a decade. And as economic historian Robert Higgs shows in his 2006 book, “Depression, War, and Cold War,” New Deal policies and the prevailing climate of ideas from which they sprang suppressed investment.
The New Deal and the genuine risk of outright socialization of industry in the 1930s kept the American economy in deep doldrums for a much longer time than would have been the case if Uncle Sam just said “laissez faire” and had conspicuously ignored all the Very Smart People who clamored for socialism. …
Sense4Fun with interesting post.
Next time you’re washing your hands and the water temperature isn’t just how you like it, think about how things used to be. Here are some facts about the 1500s.
Most people got married in June because they took their yearly bath in May and still smelled pretty good by June. However, they were starting to smell, so brides carried a bouquet of flowers to hide the body odor.
Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children — last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it. Hence the saying, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.†…
Der Spiegel writes on gas emissions from Norway’s moose population.
The poor old Scandinavian moose is now being blamed for climate change, with researchers in Norway claiming that a grown moose can produce 2,100 kilos of methane a year — equivalent to the CO2 output resulting from a 13,000 kilometer car journey. …
Division of Labour has more on the nanny state.
If you’re a hurricane watcher, Pickerhead has some sites you can visit. The National Data Buoy Center has a map where you can link to buoys placed throughout the world’s seas. An example is provided tonight in Pickings, of a 12 meter discus buoy moored in 4,400 meters of water in the Yucatan Basin between Cancun and the Caymans. We have a picture of the buoy and some information that shows wave heights reached 36 feet as Dean passed yesterday at 0250 hours Greenwich Mean Time while east winds gusted to 50 knots (58 mph).
A comprehensive website is Tropical Weather Information which provides more maps than you can imagine. An example is here tonight showing the systems getting ready to roll off the African coast.