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Understanding Obamacare—By Luke Mitchell (Harper's Magazine)
A brilliant article that exposes the myth of "free markets" especially in health care.
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The idea that there is a competitive “private sector” in America is appealing, but generally false. No one hates competition more than the managers of corporations. Competition does not enhance shareholder value, and smart managers know they must forsake whatever personal beliefs they may hold about the redemptive power of creative destruction for the more immediate balm of government intervention. This wisdom is expressed most precisely in an underutilized phrase from economics: regulatory capture.
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Further, the older such a commission gets to be, the more inclined it will be found to take the business and railroad view of things. It thus becomes a sort of barrier between the railroad corporations and the people and a sort of protection against hasty and crude legislation hostile to railroad interests.”
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Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation
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The years surrounding the Second World War represented a time of great fear, which gave way to great hope. Karl Polanyi’s book The Great Transformation , written in the context of this fear and hope, signified the accumulation of the author’s beliefs on the economy and society. The goal of this paper is to examine the ideas within Polanyi’s book, with a critical eye. The author’s views concerning the market, society, and liberalism will be examined. How ideology is expressed in the book is also an issue to be examined, as the tone of the book sheds light on its purpose.
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Sally H. Clarke | Unmanageable Risks: MacPherson v. Buick and the Emergence of a Mass Consumer Market | Law and History Review, 23.1 | The History Coo
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On May 17, 1910, Donald C. MacPherson purchased a Buick runabout from the Close Brothers dealership of Schenectady, New York.1 The new rig sported a "four cylinder, twenty-two and a half horse power" engine, allowing it to reach a speed of fifty miles per hour. Its body had been painted "French gray" and a similar gray color coated the wooden wheels. The runabout accommodated two passengers in the front seat and one in the rumble seat. Though smaller and slower than other cars on the market in 1910, the Buick served MacPherson's purposes. During the summer and fall, he drove the machine to various places in the vicinity of Saratoga Springs for his business as a stone cutter who specialized in making grave stones. Like many motorists in this early market, he stored his runabout in a barn that winter and put it back into service the following May. The auto gave him no serious trouble until July 25. While traveling at a moderate speed along a road leading into Saratoga Springs, the car's left rear wheel collapsed; the machine overturned and trapped MacPherson beneath the rear axle.2 He later testified that his "eye (right eye) [had] torn apart entirely, [and] laid down from the eye brow," and that his right arm "had broken at the wrist." He suffered such great pain in his right wrist that for many months he could not perform his work as a stone cutter as he lacked the strength to grip his tools. His eyes deteriorated: First his right eye and then his left eye began failing, making it difficult for him to identify clients and friends.3 1
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SSRN-Exclusion and Property Rules in the Law of Nuisance by Henry Smith
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Abstract:
This Article offers a theory of nuisance law based on information costs. Like trespass, much of the law of nuisance relies on a strategy of exclusion in which rights are defined using low-cost signals like boundary crossings that are only indirectly tied to particular uses. Nuisance law also supplements and fine-tunes this Blackstonian package of entitlements by means of a governance strategy, which relies on signals more directly tailored to particular uses. The information-cost advantage of strategies close to the exclusion end of the spectrum helps explain why, despite repeated calls for more balancing, nuisance law focuses on who caused invasions of whose land. Also consistent with an exclusion strategy are the staying power of traditional nonreciprocal notions of causation and the virtual nonexistence in nuisance of Rule 4 liability rules, under which plaintiffs would be permitted to invoke the law to force the polluter either to abate or shut down upon payment of the polluter's damages. Applying Hohfeldian analysis, the Article shows that the common law gives polluters at most a privilege to pollute and that Rule 4 does not refine the basic exclusion regime but rather undermines it. The general question becomes when to soften exclusion with governance and the Article concludes by arguing that, in situations such as oil and gas fields and Boomer-style pollution cases with numerous victims, only small judicial governance-style safety valves are necessary, especially if legislative and administrative solutions are forthcoming. More generally, the information-cost theory of nuisance brings the utilitarian and corrective justice approaches to nuisance closer together. Nuisance law is not a mess or mystery but does contain within it the inflection point between exclusion and governance.
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