Recommended reading

• Health care: Megan McArdle notes the results of some Medicare pilot programs meant to contain costs (and here's additional comment from Michael Cannon and Peter Suderman), Alex Tabarrok on dentists and regulation, Tyler Cowen highlights an amazing sentence about health care costs, and the impact of Medicare on health care prices (central planning anyone?).

• Curious to see examples of government throwing sand in the gears of the country's economy? See here, here, here and here.

• Der Spiegel has an update on solar power on Germany. First sentence: "The costs of subsidizing solar electricity have exceeded the 100-billion-euro mark..." But remember, solar power is the future! Previous blogging on German adventures in solar power here.

• It seems that deficit forecasting can be added to the lengthy list of things that government is not very good at.

• Now that wikipedia is back up, check out these lesser-known episodes of disaster socialism: Burma's "way to socialism" and an explanation of how socialism produced Ethiopia's famine of the mid-1980s (note the famine relief tax, a fixed priced for grain and the outlawing of grain wholesaling).