Monday Linkorama

  • Hacking your brain. I have to try some of those things.
  • Is anyone surprised that limiting campaign contributions doesn’t reduce corruption?
  • The anti-vaccination crowd now has a kid dead of Hib virus.
  • The incomparable Megan McArdle explains why mortgage cramdowns are a seriously bad idea:

    Think of these kinds of government cramdowns as doing it on the faux-cheap. It looks inexpensive, because the government isn’t shelling out directly. But making things artificially cheap by hiding the pricetag from yourself encourages you to do things you oughtn’t–just ask the current holders of “investment” properties purchased with “innovative” mortgages. In the end, the bill always comes due–and the accrued interest is usually a killer.

    I really hope the rumors that the NYT will hire her to replace the disgusting Bill Kristol are true. McArdle is one sharp lady.

  • Justice.
  • I love it. Monty Python decides to put high qualify videos of their sketches on YouTube. Absolutely free. The result. A 23,000% jump in DVD sales. They created new fans.

    The Grateful Dead did this for years. Too bad no one at RIAA has learned the lesson.

  • A must-read on how Bush betrayed all of us:

    Not too long ago, conservatives were thought of as the locus of creative thought. Conservative think tanks (full disclosure: I was one of the three founding trustees of the Heritage Foundation) were thought of as cutting-edge, offering conservative solutions to national problems. By the 2008 elections, the very idea of ideas had been rejected. One who listened to Barry Goldwater’s speeches in the mid-’60s, or to Reagan’s in the ’80s, might have been struck by their philosophical tone, their proposed (even if hotly contested) reformulation of the proper relationship between state and citizen. Last year’s presidential campaign, on the other hand, saw the emergence of a Republican Party that was anti-intellectual, nativist, populist (in populism’s worst sense) and prepared to send Joe the Plumber to Washington to manage the nation’s public affairs.

  • I think Reason needs to start a daily column responding to Paul Krugman and his depressingly smug leftie commenters. You wouldn’t think a Nobel Prize winner would fall for the Broken Window Fallacy, but there you are. My favorite is his argument that $825 billion divided by three million jobs created is apparently only $100,000 per job. Apparently, these workers will pay themselves in future years.