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10 Things Your Law Firm Boss Wants You To Know: Good advice for everyone.

I think I'm in love

Ernest Moniz, MIT physicist, nominated as energy secretary - The Washington Post: I hate to agree with President Obama, but this guy just seems great, almost too good to be true. It seems that when Obama said he favored an "all of the above" energy strategy he meant it, at least if his nominee for Secretary of Energy is any indication.

Why Do We Want Prices in Health Care? - The Daily Beast

Why Do We Want Prices in Health Care? - The Daily Beast: Megan McArdle talks with Nobel prize winning economist Bart Wilson about the role of prices in medical care and whether experts can do a better job than markets.

It's what we do know that an't so.....

Sequestration, Tea Party conspiracy?

Reich mentions something I have heard on occasion: that Medicare is more efficient than private insurance. I have not seen the study and Dr. Reich does not mention it but it is something I have heard before and I suspect that it is in some sense true. Since Medicare does no advertising and doesn't have to collect premiums (which is done for it by the IRS) all it has to do is cut checks. It is hard to see how Medicare would not be more efficient when measured purely by its payouts to administrative costs ratio. But is that the whole story?

It is hard to tell how efficient Medicare is because it is not a price taker, it is so large that it is a price maker. Indeed, it almost surely to some extent is a price maker and quantity increaser (though it also may do the exact opposite in some areas on some occasions). Indeed, since, largely thanks to the influence of government, there are few real price signals in the provision of medical care, it is hard to see how one would actually evaluate the efficiency of the Medicare program.

You can't say you weren't warned

Krugman’s ‘Death Panel’ Remarks | Video | TheBlaze.com: So those warnings about "death panels" weren't so crazy after all?

The Pot Insinuating the Kettle is Black

Ted Cruz Runs Counter to the Senate’s Courtly Ways - NYTimes.com: the main charge against the Senator? That he has pursued Hagel's financial records going back five years instead of the required two and suggesting that if the nominee is unwilling to provide those records then it is because the nominee has something to hide. The Senator has, in particular, challenged the nominee to explain the origin of a 200,000 dollar payment into his bank account a few years ago and suggested that it may have come from Saudi Arabia or even North Korea. That is quite a charge, but it is one that is easy to rebut, just produce the records.

More to the point, wasn't it just a few months ago that some of the same people that are complaining of McCarthyism now were demanding 10 years of Romney's tax returns instead of two and suggesting that he had committed felony tax evasion? Why is asking for five years McCarthyism but demanding 10 OK?

Where has all the money gone?

The Health Benefits That Cut Your Pay - NYTimes.com: Why your paycheck hasn't gone up. The American health care system succeeds only in hiding from consumers how much they are paying for health care, and in preventing them from doing anything about it.

From the department of bobus statistics:

How the Obama Administration Inflates Deportation Statistics | NumbersUSA - For Lower Immigration Levels: Always remember boys and girls, to count is to categorize.

Left of Center Blogger discovers his inner conservative

Starting my small business: Cities make it incredibly hard to get a business license:

Nothing makes you see the virtues of small government like starting a business. Matthew Yeglasias--a very well-known liberal writer--discovers what it is like to have to get the government's permission to rent a room out of his house. These are like a tax, though since they are taken out in kind they are seldom measured. An interesting point that he makes is that the rules are especially difficult to follow if you have limited English or a 9-5, inflexible working schedule, hurting precisely the kinds of working class people that liberals presumably aim to help.

Be a good little bunny

Unexamined Premises » A Hill To Fight On — Not a Desk to Die Under:

The message of the video posted can be summed up simply: be a good little bunny. Don't fight, don't resist. This is how our elites see us, as scared little bunnies to be herded out of the way or told to hid in a corner. Disgusting.

Investigating people rather than crimes

The Volokh Conspiracy » Glenn Reynolds: “Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything is a Crime”: This is a great problem. Laws are so numerous, contradictory and vague that a prosecutor can find something with which to charge almost anyone. It has come to the point where prosecutors decide to go after an individual before they have a report of a crime knowing that they can always find something they can charge with.

Correlation does not equal causation

But that doesn't mean we can't investigate. Global Warming and Hot Women: A pictorial investigation.

Mead's Typology of American Ideology

Full Fathom Five: 5.0 Liberalism and the Future of the State:

I was discussing the standard two dimensional, four part typology of American ideology in my Public Policy class today and then I ran across this posy by Walter Russell Mead. In discussing the troubles of the "Blue State Model," his term for the high tax/high level of services model of social policy that prevails in the so called Blue States, he lays out a different typology of American ideologies based on the area of the country in which they originated and the chief theoretical and political proponent of those ideologies. The dimensions on which ideologies differ are three instead of two: the size of the state, the scope of the state and the degree of centralization of the state (in the American context the division of powers between the state and central governments).

The New England Puritan tradition: strong state, involvement in social issues, centralized. This tradition wants a strong and centralized state that will be the moral agent of the community, taking a leading role in the moral improvement of the citizenry.

The New York, Hamiltonian tradition: Strong state, intervening to strengthen economic growth but staying out of moral issues, centralized.

The Virginia, Jeffersonian tradition: Weak state, staying out of moral issues but sometimes intervening in the economy to protect against the kinds of large businesses fostered by the Hamiltonians, decentralized, states over federal governments and local governments before state governments.

The West Virginal, Jacksonian tradition: strong state, intervening in moral issues (though often disagreeing with the New England tradition about what moral issues are important) but intervening in the economy on the side of the little guy and even supporting direct benefits to the citizenry from the state, supportive of the central government.

Mead argues that most political debate is less about specific policy questions than it is about which of these four models or grand theories of the proper role of the state and aims towards which government should be directed should predominate. This leads to a lot of purely practical questions about how policies designed for the 1930s should be adapted to current conditions, or, as Mead puts it, "it has turned the question of the transformation out of industrial Fordism into a question of political philosophy in the United States."

This is the meaning of the post's title, Liberalism 5.0. Liberalism 4.0 dominated the 20th century but the economics of strong family formation and constant or increasing population, well-defined gender roles and lifetime employment at large industrial firms that supported it are no more.