Links

Progress?

• Ed Glaeser discusses how market forces bring people together and force them to interact, arguing that restrictions on trade work against the social nature of mankind. Politics, by contrast, is almost inherently divisive.

• The Economist presents an alternative Big Mac index.

• Mark Perry has video of perfectly good cars being destroyed through the cash for clunkers program. Only the most economically illiterate among us can see this as progress.

• Reason discusses what it calls "health care omerta" in the U.K. while here in the U.S. Whole Foods' CEO is coming under added pressure for having the temerity to criticize current health care reform proposals.

• The Daily Mail has a report on the lack of maternity beds in the U.K.'s National Health Service hospitals.