TCS Daily : April 2009 Archives
The Fajita Flu
Influenza pandemics are the stuff of nightmares. My father was able to recall the "Spanish flu" pandemic during the winter of 1918-19, when classes in his Philadelphia grade school were canceled for weeks, shops were closed, and open horse-drawn wagons...
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Doubting Der Spiegel
The already embattled Georgian President Mikheil "Misha" Saakashvili's ill-fortunes don't seem to be improving. In late March, Der Spiegel published a damning account of the yet-unreleased findings of the EU inquiry into the brief August war between Georgia and Rus
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Frankensteins, or Davids?
Evgeny Morozov's thoughtful piece in Boston Review on Cyber Utopia, which I found through John Brown's admirable blog, gives bows to Clay Shirky and Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and places some nice emphasis on our favorite subject,...
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The Death of Democratic Capitalism?
How far will the Obama administration move to assert regulatory control over key sectors of the economy? Are we moving away from democratic capitalism, and toward some sort of corporatist state-directed economy? That could be the biggest stock market and...
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FDA's Woes Will Grow Under New Leadership
The FDA, which regulates products worth more than $1 trillion -- a quarter of every consumer dollar -- has over the past two decades become a dangerous impediment to patients' getting the medicines they need. Drug development costs are up,...
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Stimulating Civil Society
The President's stimulus legislation, together with the recently enacted omnibus supplemental spending bill (H.R. 1105), undeniably represent for the immediate future the federal government's expanded role in public welfare provision. In the short term there will b
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Stock Market Corrections Are Beautiful -- and Necessary
Every correction is the same, a normal downturn in one or more of the markets where we invest. There has never been a correction that has not proven to be an investment opportunity. You can be confident that governments around...
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TARP the Life Insurers? This Is Nuts
Is bailout nation about to strike again? Sure looks like it. According to a bunch of front-page news stories, life-insurance companies are about to get TARPed. This is nuts. The public is clamoring for an end to TARP and bailout...
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Rising Sons
In March, I had the opportunity to visit a Japanese school. Kadena Elementary School is located on Okinawa Island in the town of Kadena, and is not to be confused with the school of the same name operated by the...
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Irreconcilable Differences
The debate on how to address the economic crisis can leave you breathless. Discerning free-market advocates understand that government meddling contributed to the troubles and restricting the government to its proper function of protecting individual rights is the
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Criticize by Creating
Most people think politics boils down to different answers to the question: how do we make the world a better place? According to idealist Michael Strong, step one is to ditch the politics. The second step to making the world...
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