Winter’s Haven

The usually excellent Glenn Greenwald has written a very poorly argued tirade against the influence of Wall Street money in national politics.
It’s trivial to use this incident to support the exact opposite of Greenwald’s conclusion. If bankers are complaining that they haven’t gotten anything in exchange for their political contribution to Democrats, then presumably [...]

Bryan Caplan eloquently summarizes the libertarian view of the welfare state:
I’m against forced redistribution, even to help the deserving poor.  Still, unless you buy the whole libertarian package, I understand taxing the rich to help the poor.  What I can’t understand is taxing everyone to help everyone.  Means-tested programs like TANF and Medicaid aren’t crazy; [...]

Michelle Goldberg ponders the Feminist Case for War.
Matthew Yglesias writes about the current research on birth control and fertility rates (featured in The Economist recently) and how it applies to Afghanistan.

Here’s an important bulletin on “rescission” (the retroactive cancellation of individual health insurance policies) from the it’s-much-much-worse-than-we-ever-imagined department.
the probability of having your [health insurance] policy torn up given a massively expensive condition is pushing 50%. One in two.
Assuming for the moment that that is correct, there’s really only one word to properly describe individual [...]

Paul Krugman has written a very clear, short overview of the Democratic health reform proposal. One observation: I can’t think of a single reason why anyone who supports the proposal should prefer it to an out-and-out single-payer system.
Instead of simply taxing people and paying their medical bills, the government will mandate that everyone buy “private” [...]

I don’t usually blog on finance or economics, but this tale is too good to pass up. James Hamilton on some recent CDS shenanigans:

A credit default swap is sometimes described as an insurance contract written against the possibility of default of a particular underlying asset. If I buy a CDS and the specified asset defaults, [...]

Some insightful observations from my favorite Marxist:

2. The Left is not proposing any viable alternative to capitalism. Whereas vulgar libertarians have their Econ 101, the [G20] protestors have nothing, bar a few money cranks and moralistic bleating about greed.What’s unforgivable here is that there are alternatives. But no-one’s interested. Why don’t we hear about market [...]

I’ve been meaning to lay out my views on this question for a long time, but now Will Wilkinson has done it for me, and probably done a better job of it than I would have.
His post is a bit long, however, so let me summarize. Some very real market failures lead to underinvestment [...]

You absolutely must read Jeff Atwood’s article describing Swoopo.com. What is Swoopo? Commenter Septomin provides an eloquent summary: “someone read about the dollar auction and decided to turn it into a business plan.”. It’s a business model that will make every casino owner envious.
Lastly, I’d like to highlight a comment by Jacob (not me), [...]

…when you’ve got a financial engineer?

Hat tip to Greg Mankiw.