One thing the left and right appear to agree on, but which seems sorely lacking in good supporting arguments, is that there’s something deeply wrong with people making tradeoffs between health or longevity and money. For instance, I posed a hypothetical to a smoking-ban supporter earlier this week: Suppose we had “smoking variances” that bars […]

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My friend David Glenn at the Chronicle of Higher Ed forwards this paper on government responses to natural disasters. The upshot is that in the wake of events like Hurricane Katrina, it becomes politically inevitable that the government will pour money into relief for the inadequately insured, but that it typically does so in an […]

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Ezra has a prima facie reasonable enough defense of New York’s transfat ban: Restaurants don’t have labels. And they’re not one size fits, or serves, all. You could force a big sign in each establishment that uses the substances, or a little emblem next to each food that carries the fats, and that would be […]

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Via Drudge, the city of Belmont in (where else?) California is set to become the first to totally ban smoking outside the home. Sorry, the single-family detatched home. Everywhere else, verboten. The aptly named Councilman Dan Warden’s “explanation” of his thinking, while on face the vacuous prating of some podunk town imbecile on a day […]

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After one too many mornings where I failed to get my ass up to turn off the alarm, Kerry finally just unplugged my clock radio, so I haven’t caught Maketplace Morning Report in a while. But Don Boudreaux was listening today and caught a doozy of an argument for higher Social Security taxes: But my […]

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Via Slashdot, it seems an elementary school near Boston is only the most recent to ban tag and other “contact” games. Money quote: Another Willett parent, Celeste D’Elia, said her son feels safer because of the rule. “I’ve witnessed enough near collisions,” she said. Near. Collisions. I couldn’t have made that one up. Our fearless […]

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Today, NPR’s Morning Edition had an audio commentary by a father whose 21-year-old son recently died of a heroin overdose, warning other parents to attend to warning signs like “the empty beer bottle in the backyard, the smell of pot on his clothes,” rather than remaining in denial, as he says he and his wife […]

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Kriston Capps replies to my smoking ban column from last week with his own taxonomy of smoking ban proponents. I posted in the comments there, but figure it’s worth reiterating one point here. I wrote: It’s not obvious why choosing to accept whatever risk is entailed in being around second-hand smoke is inherently different from […]

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