This post by my friend Ben Zycher, at NRO’s The Corner, reminds me that we still don’t know if the drugmakers are going to be net losers or net winners under the secretive deal that PhRMA made with President Obama. To wit…

A week or so ago, I was at a National Journal salon dinner, which assembled a bunch of Nearly Important People to discuss health reform. The dinner was “on the record,” so you can imagine how frank and interesting the conversation was.

So after dinner, I asked PhRMA head Billy Tauzin how much his member companies would make in excess of their $80 billion contribution to health care reform. Tauzin said they would make less than $80 billion. (PhRMA is volunteering to make less money! A net contribution to health reform! How civic-minded!)

If that’s true, I asked, then why isn’t he being replaced with a better lobbyist? Tauzin said the reason is that this deal prevents a much worse deal, which might allow reimportation, or apply Medicaid’s price controls to dual eligibles in Medicare Part D, etc.

Since his member companies would be losing money on the deal, I continued, why not release the data so we could see each company’s net contribution? Tauzin said he can’t do that for his member companies. Why not encourage them to do it? Can’t do that, he said. Besides, all the data are publicly available, so anyone could crunch the numbers themselves. Not as well as the member companies can, I observed. “Awww, sure you could!” he smiled.

So I should just trust the head of the pharmaceutical lobby that his members won’t be making money on this deal, I asked? All the data are publicly available, he replied.

A reporter friend commented, “In Tauzin We Trust? Seems like a stretch.”

I recently watched the Pacific Research Institute’s documentary “Not as Good as You Think,” about the woes of a middle-class suburban public school district, the myth of universally good middle class public schools, and the Swedish alternative of private school choice.

As with all of PRI’s policy products, the viewer gleans a lot of important information. It’s a quality piece. What’s really great about it, though, is how entertaining it is to watch. Putting myself in the place of someone not working in education policy, I can still imagine watching this flick purely to follow the story it tells. It’s definitely worth a look.

When a government increases the burden of taxes, spending, and/​or regulation, this makes it more likely that productive resources — on the margin — will gravitate to jurisdictions with better economic policy. Crafty politicians understand that the freedom to cross borders is a threat to statist policies, which is why international bureaucracies dominated by high-tax nations, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, are trying to undermine tax competition between nations by imposing fiscal protectionism. The same is true for regulation. The Chairman of a key House committee wants to impose regulatory protectionism to restrict the ability of Americans to patronize banks and other financial services companies based in jurisdictions with more laissez-faire policies. The Financial Times has the unsavory details:

Barney Frank, chairman of the House financial services committee, said he was concerned the new U.S. push to regulate banks and brokers more rigorously could put it at a competitive disadvantage if other countries did not follow suit. As a result, he would like to ban U.S. banks from doing business with countries not subject to similarly tough standards on everything from leverage limits and capital requirements to rules on transparency and clearing of derivatives. “Once we have rules . . . we will say to anybody who wants to be an outlier, ‘you forfeit your right to participate in the American system’,” Mr Frank told the Financial Times. “We will instruct the [Securities and Exchange Commission] and Treasury and the Fed to deny access to the American financial system to any country that holds itself out as a haven to escape our financial regulation.” …“It is absolutely the wrong approach,” said a top industry lawyer, who did not want to be identified criticising Mr Frank. “The assumption is that everybody has to do business in the U.S. and we can set global standards. That is absolute nonsense. There are alternatives, including Hong Kong,” the lawyer added. …Tim Ryan, president of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, said that U.S. regulations should not be imposed on other countries. …Mr Frank’s interest in banning groups from non-co-operating countries stems in part from the U.S. experience after it adopted the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate accountability law. Many overseas companies opted to list outside the U.S. rather than comply with Sarbox requirements.

I have blogged repeatedly of my concern that charter schools are likely to succumb to the same heavy burden of rules and regulations that beset traditional public schools. And that, in doing so, they will expand rather than contract the existing state monopoly – first assimilating independent private schools into their fold, and then homogenizing them as the regulatory burden mounts.

This does not appear to be one of the concerns that will be represented at a forthcoming Fordham Foundation event on charter schools and the future of school choice. Instead, Fordham staff and their guests will discuss whether the current administration’s desire to expand the number of charter schools has doomed the voucher movement to irrelevancy.

It’s an interesting enough topic by itself, and suitably provocative, but it also excludes from consideration a far larger segment of the private school choice policy spectrum: education tax credits. Perhaps to their occasional advantage, tax credits seem to garner far less attention among education technocrats than do vouchers. Yet scholarship donation and personal use credits are benefitting more than 5 times as many students as vouchers, though the benefit is generally smaller. Credit programs are growing faster than vouchers, on average, and seem to enjoy more bi-partisan support — certainly when it comes to programs not limited to special-needs students.

I’m sure the upcoming Fordham event will be interesting, almost as much for what it will omit as what it will include.

That was my response to a comment from talk radio host Brian Wilson, about 14 minutes into this podcast, on the White House’s Snitch Project. Of course, the conversation leading up to that is well worth 14 minutes.

After a morning workout and attending Mass this Sunday, I read El Mercurio (Chile’s paper of record) online. Although I seldom read Chilean newspapers blogs (too many attacks and too much dirt), I did so that morning because I was impressed by the indignation expressed by my friend Luis Larraín in his Sunday blog (titled “Canallas” – Shameless). I had named Larraín Superintendent of Social Security when he was 25 years old. At that time I was 30 and Secretary of Labor and Social Security.

With astonishment I discovered that a certain “Mr. Murillo”, in the comment number 10 on the blog (which I copied immediately, and backed up electronically), explicitly attacked another commenter, Mr. José Fregoso Edelstein, by saying that his previous comment was due to the fact that he is from a “bad race” because he is Jewish.

I immediately logged in to Twitter and posted a ‘tweet’ demanding El Mercurio delete the blog comment, because it is a terrible insult directed at a group of people that have suffered indescribable horrors, not only in the 20th Century, but throughout history. I would have done the same thing if the insult was directed at Palestinians, Lebanese, Croatians, or any other racial/​religious/​national group.

However, I found an unexpected surprise. Instead of receiving immediate support for an action I thought just and reasonable, several people on Twitter attacked Jews, and me for defending them (one wrote, “You have used your enormous prestige in Chile to become “a shield for the Jews”). They also accused me of “encouraging censorship”, suggesting a “media dictatorship”, etc.… I replied inmediately in Twitter to the least offensive ones. Fifteen minutes later I received a ‘tweet’ from an editor at El Mercurio, saying that they had seen my complaint in Twitter and that they were studying the situation. With another tweet I insisted on immediate deletion of the comment. Twenty minutes later the newspaper editors deleted the offensive comment number 10. I want to emphasize that the editorial mistake, even this grievous one, does not compromise the newspaper El Mercurio as a whole, and its fast action in regard to the issue speaks to the newspaper’s chief editor’s integrity. It was an extraordinary triumph of the fast boat Twitter over the “media carrier” in Chile, another demonstration of the liberating potential of the wonderful new technologies being developed in the land of the free and the brave.

What left me very worried, and the reason I wrote this, is having detected a worrisome anti-Semitic sentiment among my fellow countrymen. Is this unjust anti-Semitic sentiment widespread, though hidden, in Chile, or was this only a “black swan?” I declare myself in a state of alert. We are building a free and good country. There should be no place whatsoever for the language of hate and the discrimination of minorities. As the great Albert Einstein said: “The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.”

Yesterday, I posted a blog entry responding to an interview with historian Diane Ravitch in which she criticized “privatization” and asserted that “deregulation nearly destroyed our economy in the past decade.” My response was directed at Prof. Ravitch, but touches on a bigger issue with which all people in the education debate need to grapple: How much should the school choice debate be centered not around test scores or financial costs – though those are obviously very important considerations – but on the role and structure of education in a free society? Can we not trust free people to make their own education decisions? If not, how can our system of education be compatible with a nation firmly rooted in individual liberty?

That is a debate I think we desperately need to have – it is fundamental for a free society – and I hope others will join in.