Mises Daily Tuesday by Michel Accad:
While doctors and nurses become more scarce, the number of health care administrators continues to go up. The role of these administrators is to aggregate and centralize data, although there is no evidence this increases the value of health care.
The drama over Greece’s financial crisis continues to dominate the headlines. As this column is being written, a deal may have been reached providing Greece with yet another bailout if the Greek government adopts new “austerity” measures. The deal will allow all sides to brag about how they came together to save the Greek economy and the European Monetary Union. However, this deal is merely a Band-Aid, not a permanent fix to Greece’s problems. So another crisis is inevitable.
The Greek financial crisis is far from over, although the latest developments show how much the establishment players in the bailout want to move on to the-crisis-is-over-so-turn-your-attention-elsewhere mode. While previous bailouts have always been about bailing out the big banks in France and Germany, this one looks different in that it illustrates the limits of German patience with Greece, with collateral requirements for the Greek government and orders to reorganize industries, raise taxes, and cut spending.
In contrast to the expected shortage of tens of thousands of physicians, there appears to be an abundance of health care administrators.
A survey finds that economists agree that 17 our of 18 research practices are “unjustifiable.” However, many economists engage in these practices in alarming numbers. Many of the unjustifiable practices relate to econometric issues regarding data, modeling, and cherry picking.
The Greek government continues to negotiate with international creditors following its recent default on its 1.6 billion euro loan repayment to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Consequently, Greece runs the risk of losing access to a 1.8 billion euro loan tranche and 10.0 billion euros for recapitalizing banks.
Commentators are of the view that the key factor behind the troubles in Greece is high government debt, which as a percentage of GDP stood at over 177 percent in 2014 against 79.6 percent in 1990.
In this interview, Mark Thornton expands on today’s Mises Daily article and reviews the cases of Portugal and Washington state: have the fears of the prohibitionists been realized?
1. Let’s Hope Machines Take Our Jobs: We Want Wealth, Not Jobs by Peter St. Onge
2. The Myth of CEO Pay and “Greed” by Matt Palumbo
3. Fact Checking Paul Krugman’s Claim To Be “Right About Everything” by Andrew Syrios
Tate Fegely and Jeff Deist discuss what crime and punishment might look like in a libertarian society, and how to convince skeptical libertarians that private police can do a better job of dealing with violence, theft, and fraud.
Steven Pinker is well known for his theory that violence (globally speaking) is now at lower levels than its every been, and that this is due to the triumph of enlightenment ideas. While I don’t think he’s totally wrong, I think Pinker overstates his case sometimes. For example, the fact that the world has not been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust is not due to the fact that the large regimes of the world are particularly enlightened. In fact, US policymakers routinely discussed using nuclear weapons well into the Vietnam War.
