A few weeks ago, I was discussing the launch of the Palm Pre with my friend Darren. I like the Pre, and he does too. I would rather have one of these than an iPhone, even though by all accounts the build quality of the hardware isn’t that great. It makes up for it by [...]

Peter Singer has an article in the New York Times Magazine, arguing that healthcare should be rationed in order to keep costs down. Peter Suderman at Reason Magazine disagrees:
[T]he QALY standard results in an essentially command-and-control approach to health-care distribution: Rather than let individual preferences and agreements work out prices and reach an equilibrium, the [...]

South African libertarians generally have an instinctive sympathy for the taxi industry. With good reason; the taxi industry, whatever its faults, is an entrepreneurial, bottom-up sector of the economy that has arisen in response to consumers’ needs. The taxi industry has created the closest thing South Africa has to a mass-transit system without any government [...]

Tom Robbins says South Africa should abandon its “conservative monetary policy” (ie. using interest rates to counter inflation):
The UK and US have long abandoned conservative monetary and fiscal policy to fight the recession. This ironically leaves the South African government as one of the most prominent administrations in the world to hang on to remnants [...]

Megan McArdle on the Obama deficits:
According to the CBO, which is usually preferred for projections because it does not share the White House Office of Management and Budget’s fervent desire to please the boss, the debt-to-GDP ratio will end up north of 80% early in the next decade. It peaked around 110% at the [...]

Ray Hartley is concerned about budget deficits under Zuma’s increased spending plan:
The ANC’s reaction to news that we are in recession - a pretty shocking one at that with GDP coming in at -6,4% - has been to say that spending on infrastructure and public works must be accelerated. Which is all good and well, [...]

Afrodissident says yes:
Everybody was watching to see whether he would keep or replace Mbeki’s finance minister, Trevor Manuel, associated with the conservative economic policies adopted by the government since 1996 (policies that were good for the market, but bad for the country’s poor majority). In the end, Zuma appointed a new finance minister, Pravin Gordhan [...]