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I've been a subscriber to Reason magazine since the mid-1970s,
and (imho) their December issue had one of their best articles
ever, by Jacob Sullum, about political free speech and its
opponents. Check it out.
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While you're over there, Jacob's latest
column looks at campaign spending in the recent cycle.
Interesting trivia:
The squandered money included $46 million that Linda McMahon, the Republican Senate candidate in Connecticut, spent out of her personal funds, which amounted to nearly $100 for each vote she received. She lost by 12 points. Less dramatically, John Raese, the Republican running for a Senate seat in West Virginia, spent $4.6 million of his own money ($20 per vote) and lost by 10 points.
But this year's poster child for the lesson that money can't buy you love is former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who blew $140 million of her own money ($45 per vote) in her race for California governor against Democrat Jerry Brown, who won by 12 points. Also in California, a marijuana legalization initiative got more votes than Whitman but still lost by eight points, even though its supporters outspent its opponents by 10 to 1.
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Since I am a long-time Reason subscriber, I tend to assume that
government regulation at federal, state, and local levels
is corrupt, incompetent, and anti-consumer. So Timothy Noah at
Slate
is unintentionally amusing
when he is simply shocked to discover that same old story playing out with the Alabama's
State Board of Medical Examiners, which is proposing to restrict
performance of
"interventional pain management" tasks to medical doctors, a rule
heavily advocated by, and benefiting… well, doctors, and nobody else.
Noah treats this as if he'd just discovered a new continent:
But as the Alabama example demonstrates, some government agencies put interest-group needs ahead of consumers', and will throw up regulatory barriers to protect them.
You can almost hear Tim thinking: but this isn't how they told us it would work back there in Liberal School!
Nov
11
2010