Do you feel hopeless when you hear that health care spending as a percent of GDP is rising inexorably? Do you think that the only way to slow or reverse this rise is some form of rationing? Health economist Linda Gorman shows that the "Blue Cross" way of paying for health care caused the problem and that it is the result of decades-old government regulation. The individual health insurance market, by contrast, is more like a normal insurance market. Buyers are aware of costs and don't tend to insure against small losses. Moreover, as long as they pay their premiums, they can't lose their insurance. Could that be a model for health care reform? MORE

Europeans are now longing for a "new economic order" that would be stressless. If such a one were feasible, it would be hapless.

Back to Square One. After the post-war decades of slow and uneven, but rewarding progress toward a better integrated world economy, less restrictive and red-tape-ridden, allowing more freedom of contract and more responsive to the ebb and flow of underlying change, it turns out that this was all a great mistake. The market "cannot regulate itself". Politicians and educated opinion, with the French out in front, are again decreeing the "end of laissez faire".... MORE