Lee Fang takes a look back in time to the years 2006-2007 when the Heritage Foundation was enthusiastic about Massachusetts’ universal health care program and thought an individual mandate was a perfectly reasonable idea.

Mark Kleiman writes apropos the drug wars in Mexico: “Any organization that is just dealing drugs, and isn’t shooting at cops and journalists and citizens, needs a good leaving-alone.”

This seems wise. Policy in both Mexico and Afghanistan seems not to appreciate the extent to which drug interdiction has zero-sum characteristics. If you reduce global demand for illegal drugs, that hurts all drug suppliers. But if you hurt one drug supplier’s operation, that helps all rival drug suppliers. If Apple started taking its profits and using them to assist the Taliban or kill Mexican police officers, we wouldn’t “crack down on tech companies,” raid Google and Microsoft, and declare that we’d just struck a blow against high-tech malefactors. In both Mexico and Afghanistan there’s a need to identify a particular set of bad behaviors and target specifically the organizations involved in those activities. That will help rival, less malign organizations and create incentives for all drug traffickers to avoid maximally pernicious behavior.

I used to watch Seinfeld all the time, both first-run episodes and re-runs. Then for years and years I didn’t. But the past couple of days I’ve caught reruns on TBS that they seem to have managed to put together in HD. Yesterday’s episode featured this policy-relevant bit:

Joking aside, one reason it’s difficult to accurately assess which states benefit the most from federal spending is that simply looking at taxes vs expenditures doesn’t capture things like the way the US Postal Service subsidizes rural living. The country wouldn’t fall apart if we privatized these mail-delivering functions, but the impact would be really disparate across different areas of the country. Private firms either wouldn’t serve low-density areas or would demand higher fees to do so.

Not to nitpick too much, but the decision by Andrew Golis and Chris Lehman to kick off their new Yahoo News venture with lame efforts at even-handedness kind of annoyed me:

And conservatives are no longer the only ones lodging complaints of bias from their own in-house platforms. Democratic and liberal-leaning organizations such as Media Matters for America and Think Progress are dedicated to calling out bias in the media on popular websites with devoted followings. [...] And the paradox, of course, is that these new referees who once cried “bias!” are often far more biased than those they critiqued. All of which makes it next to impossible to figure out when their critique of the mainstream media is actually right.

I think it’s important to note that on the Media Matters “about us” page they don’t once mention bias. I think you’d actually be extremely hard-pressed to find examples of Media Matters or ThinkProgress “calling out bias in the media.” The idea of a “biased” media is a specific kind of claim and it’s not a claim I think you’ll find being made very much at ThinkProgress. To take a recent media item from Igor Volsky here he is complaining that “ex-gay” activist Richard Cohen was invited on CNN to ask whether homosexuality should be cured:

Clearly, “the best political team on television” was just not at its best, proving that CNN can’t be “trusted” to do even the most preliminary background research on its guests. The network provided the self-proclaimed former homosexual with a platform to promote his organization, the International Healing Foundation, without once challenging his credentials or claims of rehabilitation. In reality, Cohen has been kicked out of the The American Counseling Association and currently operates without any professional license or accreditation. His views on homosexuality have been discredited by every established medical organization and his ideas about gays are apparently only taken seriously by CNN bookers and producers.

Nobody is saying that Kyra Phillips (who hosted the segment) or whoever produced it is “biased” against gays and lesbians or anyone else. What he’s saying is that CNN put a guy on the air as a credible expert who should not, in fact, be regarded as a credible expert. And on and on like this. Media Matters describes their mission as “monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.” That’s a mission that’s distinct from the conservative conspiracy theory that there’s a vast “bias” in the media aimed at discrediting them through the presentation of some non-conservative ideas.

Is it really “next to impossible” to figure out whether or not Igor is right about this item than it is to figure out whether or not any factual claim is right?

Reading Kevin Drum and Alyssa Katz on why Texas didn’t see a housing bubble, it occurred to me that they might be asking the wrong question. Here’s Phoenix vs Dallas:

It seems to me that the real issue here is not about Dallas, but about Phoenix. Most of the places where we saw huge run-ups in price—Los Angeles, Miami, New York, whatever—are places where a combination of geography and regulation significantly constrained supply. There’s only so much coastline in Southern California or South Florida, permitting in New York City is complicated, and the suburbs of New York generally won’t allow themselves to become denser. In Dallas or Denver where there’s no key focal point, you respond to increased demand by increasing supply. But two key bubble cities—Phoenix and Las Vegas—have generally Dallas-esque characteristics.

So what went wrong? Ryan Avent hazards an explanation:

As it turns out, you can “catch” a bubble from elsewhere. Migration to Las Vegas and Phoenix came overwhelmingly from Southern California. Residents of Los Angeles would cash out their homes and move east, buying one or two properties in cheaper markets, investing in those properties, and generally transmitting the bubble mentality that characterised the real estate markets of the California coast. Analysis of price movements has identified ripple effects from the Los Angeles property market to the Las Vegas property market, and thence on to the Phoenix property market. It seems likely that a similar phenomenon took place in Florida, which absorbed a great deal of migration from bubbly northeastern markets.

These “caught” bubbles were incredibly damaging, because they combined rapidly rising prices with rapidly rising inventory, leading to massive housing overhangs and price declines up to and greater than 50% from peak. But other Sunbelt metropolitan areas managed to avoid them, perhaps because they absorbed more workers from declining markets elsewhere in the south or northeast or midwest. Housing supply growth then prevented any big initial increase in prices which might have led to the enthusiastic growth in credit that triggered bubbles elsewhere.

A strange world.