Bill Gates Needs an Economic Course on Free-Markets

Dropping out of college didn’t stop Bill Gates from making tons of money, but it kept him from classes where he might have learned about the beauty of spontaneous market processes. Never mind. I forgot that he attended Harvard. He might not have learned about...

Socialized Medicine Is Wrong For Colorado

The Colorado Blue Ribbon Commission on Health Care Reform recently selected four proposals for health care reform for eventual consideration by the state legislature. Although they differ in their details, these differences are dwarfed by their fundamental similarity...

FDA: Friend or Foe?

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is charged with ensuring that only safe and effective drugs are marketed. Such a task is highly complex and fraught with difficulties. Consumers, the ostensible beneficiaries, should examine and question the incentive...

The Writing Process: One Step at a Time

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (or NAEP), the average high school student is an incompetent writer. To evaluate their writing ability, testers asked high school juniors to write a paragraph based on notes they were given about a haunted...

The Failure of Field Trips, Part 2

In my recent article “The Failure of Field Trips,” I explained what is wrong with traditional school outings. The typical field trip is irrelevant to the students’ education, either because they have been unprepared to appreciate it by their...

Creating Effective Incentives

What should our response be if terrorists set off a nuclear explosion, or some other weapon of mass destruction, in one of our cities? I put this question to Professor Victor Hanson, senior research fellow at Stanford University’s prestigious Hoover Institution,...