"You could have let an unaccountable system play out in the darkness of free enterprise..." -Dr. Donald Berwick, on the wise choice of the British Healthcare system, London 2008.

This article appears in the Boston Globe, today, Tuesday June 15, 2010.

Why the Arizona immigration law makes sense here, too.

by Michael Stopa

How many jobs per year must the economy produce in order to return to a historical average unemployment rate at some specified time in the future ? This is an easy question to ask and it turns out an easy question to answer. If we make the assumption that, starting today, the peak growth of the Reagan boom starts again, it turns out that unemployment gets back to "normal" sometime around 2017.

[I spoke with Assistant Professor Lauren Cohen and, more briefly, with Assistant Professor Christopher Malloy of The Harvard Business School this morning and asked some questions about their recent, celebrated study on government spending and the response of the private sector. Here is a brief distillation of that conversation and a review of the work. My thanks to Lauren Cohen for editing this piece for accuracy and coherence.]

The great economist and Nobel Laureatte Freidrich A. Hayek once said: "the more the state 'plans' the more difficult planning becomes for the individual."