Medical reform not only accomplished nothing, it actually made matters substantially worse. In sharp contrast to medical reform, I cannot come up with any financial reform provisions that make matters substantially worse. Given the absolute best we could ever expect out of a major piece of legislation supported and promoted by Obama is nothing, and given that nothing was accomplished with no major detriments making matters much worse, the financial reform bill must be considered a stunning success. Indeed, we should all be thrilled by it.

What’s also true is that the Commission’s case boils down to a comical argument that a state agency is violating FTC rules by … behaving exactly like the FTC.

Are economists any better at assessing the economy than the people who are the economy?

Breaking up banks is not a way to solve the TBTF problem. The Kanjorski amendment is a lame-brained remedy. The problem is it not merely the size of these firms, but the fact that they control infrastructure that is deemed critical to modern commerce. I’ll get into specifics in short order, but in some cases the firm owns critical plumbing outright; in other cases, it is so tightly networked to other firms that mucking with it very much runs the risk of taking down the rest of the grid. As Richard Bookstaber pointed out in his book Demon of our Own Design, in a tightly coupled system, efforts to mitigate risk typically make matters worse. You need to reduce the degree of integration first, then more direct efforts to lower risk are less likely to produce unexpected perturbations.

That reason is substantial growth in productivity, which is the only source of sustained and widespread prosperity. So, rather than lament the fact that we get more manufacturing output today by using fewer workers, we should celebrate – in the same way that we celebrate the fact that we get more agricultural output from fewer and fewer workers.

Ultimately, the US trade deficit is a by-product of an attractive investment climate.

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.

With regard to education, my impression is that the educational sector in the U.S. is about as inflexible the European labor market - the entire structure is hugely inefficient because it is detached from measures of quality and student time-on-task, undercompensating many excellent teachers and at the same time institutionalizing the employment of poor ones. Meanwhile, the failure of parents to maintain a heavy involvement in their kids’ education, in the belief that the responsibility for education, personal responsibility and moral development can simply be thrust onto teachers, is a problem that money alone can’t address.