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One of the purported benefits of nationalized health care is that it will be more efficient than private insurers since it would lack the profit motive and have lower administrative expenses, like Medicare. But one reason entitlement programs are so easy to defraud is precisely because they don’t have those overhead costs — they automatically pay whatever bills roll in with valid claims numbers.

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Those of us dedicated to the zoology of celebrity should have known it was over when the death of next-to-nobody Anna Nicole Smith filled the airwaves in 2007 for a week. Celebrity had lost its meaning. We will bury its golden age in Jacko’s tomb.

South Carolina and New York can have only one deranged governor. Mass marketing can’t produce politicians and cheapen them further. Most of the time they don’t do much of anything, just like celebrities. Meet Senator Franken.

A poll in the last election found that most people think they could do a better job than their own Member of Congress. So I expect that TV will soon create a reality Congress show. Average people could pretend to run a whole country, just like the celebrities who are pretending to run Washington.

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When President Obama signed legislation in mid-June to bring tobacco under FDA regulation, few seemed outraged that the legislation had been co-written by Philip Morris USA (PM). The bill was designed, critics say, to stabilize the place of cigarettes in our society: to diminish the threat of health-related lawsuits, to prevent competitive yet possibly safer products from being introduced, and to lock in Philip Morris’ market share. It’s not just the Harvard School of Public Health leveling these charges but even Sen. Bob Bennett, Republican of Utah, a supporter of the intent of the bill who was nonetheless “convinced we would do better if we told Philip Morris to stay out of the process of writing tobacco legislation.”

Five years after the tobacco buyout, and with the second prong of tobacco legislation newly passed, it’s worth checking in. As with other crops, the government had for years been paying some farmers not to grow tobacco to maintain prices for those who did. By the time 2004 rolled around, nearly 85 percent of tobacco permit holders weren’t growing tobacco at all. The permits were being bought and sold for their annual cash payments, like some sort of strange tobacco bond. The quota system, which could have been used to end domestic tobacco production altogether, worked in that it kept prices high and kept small farmers in business.

According to one story on the buyout, some farmers have stopped growing commodity crops like corn and wheat to switch to the wildly more profitable tobacco crop. “A reasonable profit for an acre of corn is about $100. For tobacco,” T.J. Vaughan said in that story, “it’s $1,000 to $1,500.”

With this new FDA move, no doubt tobacco will soon be added to the War on Drugs. I’m sure the Mafia is rubbing its hands and counting up the potential profits, with memories of Prohibition fresh in everyone’s mind — except that of the bureaucrats in Washington.

Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

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Bet the government will find some way to screw it up.

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A mummified dinosaur unearthed in North Dakota may contain traces of 66-million-year old organic material, which could provide vital information about its evolution.

Bryan Caplan looks behind the handwaving.

If an economist wants to ward off the spirit of laissez-faire insurance policy, all he has to do is repeatedly chant “moral hazard and adverse selection.”  The funny thing about this two-part mantra, though, is that the “moral hazard” part doesn’t do any of the work.  Almost no one even pretends that governments do anything to mitigate it.

Bottom line: Real-world insurance regulation has little or nothing to do with economists’ “moral hazard and adverse selection” mantra.  The “intellectual” bases of real-world regulation of insurance are rather populism and paternalism: Big bad insurers won’t cover people unless it’s profitable, and simple-minded consumers don’t care enough about their own health to pay for it themselves.

Contrary to e.g. Krugman, insurance isn’t a “special” market where laissez-faire doesn’t work.  Instead, it’s a normal market where democratic politics doesn’t work, because both the public and economists remain wedded to populism and paternalism.

Steve Sailer cuts to the chase.

The Ricci reactions have made more evident that liberals are peeved that anybody takes seriously all that language in the civil rights laws about equal protection. In the liberal mind, the specific wording of the laws was just a sham to get them approved. The laws are really simply about “Who? Whom?” Thus, the idea of civil rights laws being used by the Supreme Court to protect the civil rights of white guys like Frank Ricci is an affront against all that is holy (i.e., civil rights laws).

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The map, commissioned by English Heritage, is to be placed in a suite of rooms in Dover Castle’s keep which are being refurbished to look as they did when King Henry II built them in the 1180s.

Ooo! Ahh! Pretty!

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Necessity is the mother of invention.

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New claims of torture and abuse of Iraqi civilians by British soldiers will be made in 20 fresh cases being prepared by human rights lawyers in London, it is reported.

Hm. No mention of there being any human rights lawyers in Baghdad. Wonder why that is?

I have an idea: Let’s torture the human rights lawyers. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

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No one can destroy an economy like the government.

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One of the country’s leading sculptors is suing for damages after his “life’s work” was destroyed when a garage was knocked down to make way for a housing project, a court heard.

This is what happens when you put your life in storage.

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The Minnesota Supreme Court yesterday declared Democrat Al Franken the winner of last year’s disputed Senate race, and Republican incumbent Norm Coleman’s gracious concession at least spares the state any further legal combat. The unfortunate lesson is that you don’t need to win the vote on Election Day as long as your lawyers are creative enough to have enough new or disqualified ballots counted after the fact.

If we’re going to have a Senate that’s a joke, the least we could do is get somebody who’s actually funny, like Robin Williams.

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Go ahead. You’re free to donate to cancer research.