Apparently Ayn Rand’s popularity is growing on the subcontinent. For more on Rand’s resurgence, attend or watch online this Cato event next week.
(H/T: Josh Blackman.)
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Apparently Ayn Rand’s popularity is growing on the subcontinent. For more on Rand’s resurgence, attend or watch online this Cato event next week.
(H/T: Josh Blackman.)
I am delighted to report that Libertarianism: A Primer has been published in Chinese. Let’s hope for sales in the tens of millions! The good folks at the Atlas Global Initiative posted an interview with me about the book, with subtitles in Chinese. (In my experience, it plays more smoothly if you turn the HD button off. But then, there’s nothing really new in the interview for American viewers.)
Thanks to the good folks at www.guominliyi.org and www.ipencil.org for making this book possible. The support of the project by a Chinese entrepreneur shows not only the growth of the Chinese economy, but one of the additional benefits of economic growth: diverse sources of wealth, with different people making different investments and encouraging diverse ideas.
Libertarianism: A Primer has also been published in Russian, Japanese, Spanish, Czech, Polish, Serbian, Bulgarian, Cambodian, Mongolian, Kurdish, and Persian. Translations into Arabic, Portuguese, and Italian are underway. And of course you can get it in audio form. Not Kindle yet, but feel free to tell them you’d like a Kindle edition.
Today’s Arena question over at Politico asks:
Is Fox News a “legitimate news organization?” Is the White House smart, or not so smart, to take on Fox?
Is Fox News a “legitimate news organization?” As compared to what? The New York Times? NPR? MSNBC? Please.
The Obama team, Democrats like my good friend Walter Dellinger, and the so-called Mainstream Media (MSM) howl about Fox News for two main reasons. First, Fox is covering news the MSM ignores because it doesn’t “fit.” And second, in part because of that, the Fox audience continues to grow while the MSM audience is shrinking, raising a serious question about whether the MSM is any longer “mainstream.”
Let’s not pretend that the MSM doesn’t “manage” the news. It does it mainly by deciding daily what is and is not “news” and then by deciding how to report that news. Do we need any better example than the current ACORN story? As Fox was bringing the facts to light, nowhere were those facts to be found in the MSM — until they could be ignored no longer. Or take the huge 9/12 anti-big-government rally here in Washington. Fox covered it for the event that it was. Where was it covered in The New York Times? On page A37. And more revealing still, in the NYT electronic edition, the second of three stories posted under “Politics” was headlined “Thousands Rally in Minnesota Behind Obama’s Call for Health Care Overhaul,” the third was headlined “Thousands Rally in Capital to Protest Big Government” — the implication being that the two rallies were equivalent in size when in fact the protest rally dwarfed the Obama rally by many multiples.
But why pretend it’s otherwise? The president himself admits the MSM bias. Speaking at the May 9 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, “I am Barack Obama. Most of you covered me. All of you voted for me. (Laughter and applause.) Apologies to the Fox table.” A good laugh line in that setting, to be sure, but only because he’s said at last what we all know to be true.
Walter Dellinger may write, citing no evidence, that the Tax Day Tea Party protests were “conceived and executed by Fox News,” but he surely knows that’s not true. He hails from North Carolina, albeit now from Duke. He knows that outside that cloister there’s protest in the land. Fox News isn’t generating that opposition to the Obama juggernaut. It’s real, but it’s so much easier for the MSM to blame the bearer of that news than to face the reasons for their own falling numbers: Their “news” doesn’t fit with what so many people see with their own eyes. I’m reminded of the great Groucho Marx line: “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”
C/P Politico’s Arena
Is it because health care is special? Or is it because we have treated health care as though it were special?
David Goldhill is the CEO of the Game Show Network and author of “How American Health Care Killed My Father,” in the September 2009 issue of The Atlantic.
In this Cato video, Goldhill explains why a consumer-driven health care sector would never produce the often horrific problems we see in American medicine, and why the legislation moving through Congress fails to address those problems.
See Goldhill’s complete remarks here.
Want to look cool, authentic and rugged? Want to celebrate the work of a famous communist murderer? J.Crew has something for you: The Beltstaff® Che Guevara replica jacket for only $795. Credit cards only.
Update: It looks like J. Crew got some heat for the reference to Che Guevara, and renamed the jacket. However, my colleague Chris Moody found a screen shot of the page when it still mentioned the name of the bloody Latin American revolutionary.
I’m surprised anyone was surprised by the recent flat-lining of scores on the NAEP 4th grade math test. The rate of improvement in NAEP scores has been declining since No Child Left Behind was passed, and the recent results are consistent with that trend.
But what really amazes me is that so many people think the solution is just to tweak NCLB! The unstated assumption here is that federal policy is a key determinant of educational achievement. That’s rubbish.
We’ve spent $1.8 trillion on hundreds of different federal education programs since 1965, and guess what: at the end of high school, test scores are flat in both reading and math since 1970, and have actually declined slightly in science. (Charted for your viewing pleasure here).
If we’ve proved anything in the past 40 years, it is that federal involvement in education is a staggering waste of money.
Meanwhile, education economists have spent the last several decades finding out what actually does work in education. They’ve compared different kinds of school systems and it turns out that parent-driven, competitive education markets consistently outperform state monopoly school systems like ours. I tabulated the results in a recent peer-reviewed paper and they favor education markets over monopolies by a margin of 15 to 1.
So policymakers who actually care about improving educational outcomes should be spending their time and resources enacting laws that will bring free and competitive education markets within reach of all families. And they should be ignoring the education technocrats who — like Soviet central planners — just want to keep spending other people’s money tweaking their fruitless five year plans.