Freespace

Why personal hygeine is important

Thanks to Erin for the pointer.

Are the paleocons relevant to libertarianism?

There’s a strange post by Jason Kuznicki at Positive Liberty about the Ron Paul crackup and what it means for libertarianism. It ends with particularly confusing comments about how both Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand are dead, and therefore…? Which is strange since as a historian, he of all people should know the importance of learning from history, lest we repeat it. I would like to believe that the division between the Doughfaces and the libertarians will be lost in the past when the post-Goldwater generation really takes hold of libertarianism, but that will only be accomplished if the ideas are clarified. Future generations won’t understand things any more than the present generation if we don’t at least help make our present intelligible.

Is Canada's economy a model for America?

I really enjoyed Mark Steyn's comments in this month's Imprimis about the economic situation in Canada and its comparison to the United States.

Canadian dependence on the United States is particularly true in health care, the most eminent Canadian idea looming in the American context. That is, public health care in Canada depends on private health care in the U.S. A small news story from last month illustrates this:

A Canadian woman has given birth to extremely rare identical quadruplets. The four girls were born at a U.S. hospital because there was no space available at Canadian neonatal intensive care units. Autumn, Brook, Calissa, and Dahlia are in good condition at Benefice Hospital in Great Falls, Montana. Health officials said they checked every other neonatal intensive care unit in Canada, but none had space. The Jepps, a nurse and a respiratory technician were flown 500 kilometers to the Montana hospital, the closest in the U.S., where the quadruplets were born on Sunday.

There you have Canadian health care in a nutshell. After all, you can’t expect a G-7 economy of only 30 million people to be able to offer the same level of neonatal intensive care coverage as a town of 50,000 in remote, rural Montana. And let’s face it, there’s nothing an expectant mom likes more on the day of delivery than 300 miles in a bumpy twin prop over the Rockies. Everyone knows that socialized health care means you wait and wait and wait—six months for an MRI, a year for a hip replacement, and so on. But here is the absolute logical reductio of a government monopoly in health care: the ten month waiting list for the maternity ward.

Read the rest...

Property owners still vulnerable to eminent domain

Today's St. Louis Business Journal carries my article about the City of Arnold v. Tourkakis case. Subscription is required, although it will be available for free on Monday.

Friday art

This angel (or "winged figure") is part of the monument at Hoover Dam, designed by sculptor Oskar Hansen. More on Hansen's marvelous art deco styles here.

Transplant donor’s blood type changes

Well, here’s an odd story. Demi-Lee Brennan received a liver transplant, and is now O-positive instead of O-negative as she used to be.

“I was convinced we had made a mistake, so we tested it again and it came up the same. Then we tested her parents and they were both O-negative, so it was confirmed that Demi absolutely had to have been O-negative.”

Dr Curtin said Demi-Lee’s blood then began to break down, requiring more medications.

“We then realised it was her own residual cells which were causing the problem and we needed to get rid of them. And that’s when we knew we had to convince the doctors that Demi’s immuno-suppressant drug regime should be stopped, rather than increased.”

But paediatric nephrologist Stephen Alexander says he wasn't easily convinced.

“We didn’t believe this at first. We thought it was too strange to be true,” Dr Alexander said.

“Normally the body’s own immune system rejects any cells that are transplanted … but for some reason the cells that came from the donor’s liver seemed to survive better than Demi-Lee’s own cells. It has huge implications for the future of organ transplants.”

Demi-Lee, who has now been off all immuno-suppressants for 3½ years, is playing sport and working towards her school certificate. “I feel quite normal. It’s almost like it never happened,” she said yesterday. “I can’t thank the donor’s family enough, and the doctors, for giving me this second chance at life.”

Thanks to my mother for the pointer.

Just for the record

I'd like to second Ed Brayton's comments regarding Gary Hurd.

The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics

I was delighted to receive my copies of The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics in today's mail. It includes my article on "Innovation." It's really overwhelming to see my name on the contents page alongside so many writers whom I admire. Pick up a copy today!

Somin and Kerr on judicial review

There’s been an interesting exchange at the Volokh Conspiracy about judicial review. I, perhaps predictably, side with Somin on this, but I was surprised he did not mention what I consider the best response to Kerr’s claim that judicial “restraint” is warranted because “the legitimacy of government is premised on the consent of the governed,” and while “legislatively enacted laws...reflect a process involving wide participation of those who will be governed by them through their elected officials,” judges who declare laws void are acting “on their own.”

But the principle underlying judicial review is that legislation does not in fact represent the consent of the governed—it represents the consent of their deputies; the consent of a particular legislature at a particular time. It may or may not represent the will of the people, which is expressed in the Constitution. When the courts find a law unconstitutional, therefore, they are—assuming they are correct—enforcing the overriding will of the people instead of the particular judgment of the people’s temporary deputies. That, at least, is the argument in Federalist 78, and it is why my hero Stephen Field declared the Supreme Court “the most Democratic of all” of the federal government’s branches: while the legislature enacts the desires of a particular legislative coalition at a particular time, the Constitution, and the limits it imposes on the legislature, represent the genuine consent of the governed.

I discuss this much more in depth in my article “The Wolves And The Sheep of Constitutional Law,” which you can read here.

The rest is emptiness

This documentary about North Korea is absolutely astonishing. What if the Soviet Union were still around? It would look just like this.

via PL