George Will thinks they are moving in that direction:

If pessimism is not creeping on little cat’s feet into Republicans’ thinking about their 2012 presidential prospects, that is another reason for pessimism. This is because it indicates they do not understand that sensible Americans, who pay scant attention to presidential politics at this point in the electoral cycle, must nevertheless be detecting vibrations of weirdness emanating from people associated with the party.

Will’s concern is that “birther” craziness from people like Huckabee and Gingrich makes independents run screaming back to the Democrats.  I agree.  

Will’s conclusion pulls no punches:

Let us not mince words. There are at most five plausible Republican presidents on the horizon – Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former Utah governor and departing ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, former Massachusetts governor Romney and former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty.

So the Republican winnowing process is far advanced. But the nominee may emerge much diminished by involvement in a process cluttered with careless, delusional, egomaniacal, spotlight-chasing candidates to whom the sensible American majority would never entrust a lemonade stand, much less nuclear weapons.

From his recent visit to the Washington Post:

Calderon was passionate when talking about the de facto legalization of marijuana that seems to be taking place in some states, such as California and Colorado, under the guise of medical treatment, with no federal interference.

“For me, it’s very difficult to prosecute a very poor farmer in Mexico growing marijuana,” he said, when “industrial”-scale agriculture is flourishing north of the border. “How can I console our widows” – Mexico has lost more than 2,000 police and federal agents the past four years fighting the drug cartels – “and at the same time students in universities can smoke pot with no problems?”  …

Either prosecute or “have the honesty” to legalize. “But what you cannot do is have this incoherent policy, because it causes terrible damage.”

Calderon is right that current U.S. policy is incoherent, but he should recognize that “coherent” prohibition would be as bad or worse. The only way to stop the violence is coherent legalization.

At The Freeman Online.  My bottom line …

is that government policy should not protect unions in any way. This means no requirements for employers to bargain collectively, no rules that force all employees to be covered by union contracts, and no impediments to hiring non-union labor. Similarly, it means no restrictions on firing strikers, or closing plants, or hiring replacement workers.

Part of a new video library hosted by the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University:

For those of you in the listening area of Boston’s WBZ Radio 1030, I will be on Nightside from 9-10 PM EST with Dan Rea. The topics will include oil prices and unions. Thanks for listening.

A synthetic form of marijuana is widely used at the U.S. Naval Academy because it cannot be detected in routine drug tests, according to several former midshipmen who have been removed from campus for using or possessing the substance.

So maybe the real defense of drug prohibition is that it induces technological innovation!

Earlier today, the following two headlines appeared simultaneously on bloomberg.com:

S&P 500 Has Biggest Weekly Drop in Three Months on Concern Growth May Slow

Buffett Says His `Trigger Finger Itchy’ to Buy, With $38 Billion in Wallet

So, who(m) are you going to trust? 

Personally, I am a buy-and-hold investor, which means I ignore both headlines!

From a new working paper by my colleague Eric Field and co-authors:

The 1994 discovery of arsenic in ground water in Bangladesh prompted a massive public health effort to test all tubewells in the country and convince nearly one-quarter of the population to switch to arsenic-free drinking water sources. According to numerous sources, the campaign was effective in leading the majority of households at risk of arsenic poisoning to abandon backyard wells in favor of more remote tubewells or surface water sources, a switch widely believed to have saved numerous lives. We investigate the possibility of unintended health consequences of the wide-scale abandonment of shallow tubewells due to higher exposure to fecal-oral pathogens in water from arsenic-free sources. Significant small-scale variability of arsenic concentrations in ground water allows us to compare trends in infant and child mortality between otherwise similar households in the same village who did and did not have an incentive to abandon shallow tubewells. While child mortality rates were similar among households with arsenic-contaminated and arsenic-free wells prior to public knowledge of the arsenic problem, post-2000 households living on arsenic-contaminated land have 27% higher rates of infant and child mortality than those not encouraged to switch sources, implying that the campaign doubled mortality from diarrheal disease. These findings provide novel evidence of a strong association between drinking water contamination and child mortality, a question of current scientific debate in settings with high levels of exposure to microbial pathogens through other channels.

The lesson here is that just because a particular change might be beneficial if adopted voluntarily by an individual household, this does not mean the change is necessarily beneficial when imposed or encouraged by an outside force.  In the former case, those affected are likely to take into account both positive and  negative implications of the change and pay attention to differences in surrounding cirumstance.  In the latter case, the potential for unintended harms is readily brushed aside in the attempt to impose good intentions.

The Obama administration is trying to push through a settlement over mortgage-servicing breakdowns that could force America’s largest banks to pay for reductions in loan principal worth billions of dollars.

Terms of the administration’s proposal include a commitment from mortgage servicers to reduce the loan balances of troubled borrowers who owe more than their homes are worth, people familiar with the matter said. The cost of those writedowns won’t be borne by investors who purchased mortgage-backed securities, these people said.

This is wrong on every level: it incentivizes prospective homeowners to borrow too much,  and prospective creditors to lend too much. I know I sound like a broken record on this issue, but have we learned nothing from the subprime crisis?

Consider this quote:

Recent budgetary rhetoric emmanting from Washington and other governmental capitals suggests a growing fear that public spending is getting out of control.  … Observers of these trends have begun to realize that if this process continues, public expenditure will approach very high shares of GNP and income tax rates could get close to unity.

Sounds like something written last week, right?  Not exactly.  It’s from a paper written in 1979 by economists Paul Courant, Edward Gramlich, and Daniel Rubinfeld (“Public Employee Market Power and the Level of Government Sepdning, American Economic Review, vol. 65, #5, p.806).

Does the fact that budget alarm has occurred before mean we should worry less now?  Well, perhaps, but any reasonable assessment suggests the current situation is far worse.

And, the point of the Courant, Gramlich and Rubinfeld paper is that while local public sector unions can expand government more than is desirable, they can only do so up to a point, since voters will emigrate to better locales if tax rates get too high.

That is precisely why federal involvement in these issues would be dangerous.