Natural & Physical Sciences 
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Does Barack Obama Support Socialized Medicine?
Cato scholar Michael F. Cannon argues that "reasonable people can disagree over whether Obama's health plan would be good or bad. But to suggest that it is not a step toward socialized medicine is absurd."
Responsible Drug Use
"Those who support drug prohibition often do so with the premise, implicit or explicit, that life without prohibition would be marked by vastly more irresponsibility, addiction, accidents, health problems, and death. Those who favor ending drug prohibition are forced to argue, not only for an unfamiliar policy, but also against this parade of horribles. Yet are we not able to think about and manage these substances rationally and responsibly?"
C.S.Oy
By Radley Balko and Roger Koppl: "But as forensic evidence becomes more and more important in securing convictions, the need for monitoring and oversight grows exponentially. Every other scientific field properly requires peer review, statistical analysis, and redundancy to ensure quality and accuracy. It's past time we applied the same quality-control measures to criminal forensics, particularly given the fundamental nature of what's at stake."
Keeping Our Cool: What to do About Global Warming
By Jim Manzi: "The loss of economic and technological development that would be required to eliminate literally all theorized climate change risk would cripple our ability to deal with virtually every other foreseeable and unforeseeable risk, not to mention our ability to lead productive and interesting lives in the meantime."
The Grand Exaggerator
By Patrick Michaels: "OK, it's pretty much standard rhetoric in Washington to say that if you don't do as I say, there will be massive consequences. But to say, as Gore recently did: 'The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk;' and: 'The future of human civilization is at stake' — that's a bit much, even for the most faded and jaded political junkie."
Kidneys for Sale: Iranian Organ Donation
By Kerry Howley: "'What can Iran teach us about good governance?' is not a question often posed in Washington. But according to Benjamin Hippen, a transplant nephrologist in North Carolina, the Iranians have managed to do something American policy makers have long thought impossible: They’ve found kidneys for every single citizen in need."
Fuel vs. Food
By Indur M. Goklany: "In recent years, we've heard that climate change could be catastrophic for nature and humanity. But it's becoming increasingly evident that over the next few decades, climate-change policies could prove even more catastrophic."
The Biofuel Brew Ha-Ha
By Peter Suderman: Reason contributor Peter Suderman writes that the biofuels craze is boosting the price of beer, because farmers are shifting away from barley to biofuel crops made more lucrative by mandates and subsidies.
Showing That You Care: The Evolution of Health Altruism
By Robin Hanson: "Human behavior regarding medicine seems strange; assumptions and models that seem workable in other areas seem less so in medicine. Perhaps, we need to rethink the basics. Toward this end, I have collected many puzzling stylized facts about behavior regarding medicine, and have sought a small number of simple assumptions which might together account for as many puzzles as possible."
Is Health Care a Right?
In this podcast economics Professor Russell Roberts of George Mason University debates a physician who thinks health care is a right and the government should provide it.
Organ Transplants: Kidneys for Sale
"In his most controversial segment yet, reason.tv host Drew Carey offers a startling solution to the critical shortage in kidneys available for transplant: Pay people to donate their kidneys."
WHO's Fooling Who? The World Health Organization's Problematic Ranking of Health Care Systems
By Glen Whitman: "Those who cite the WHO rankings typically present them as an objective measure of the relative performance of national health care systems. They are not. The WHO rankings depend crucially on a number of underlying assumptions— some of them logically incoherent, some characterized by substantial uncertainty, and some rooted in ideological beliefs and values that not everyone shares."
The Ultimate Scholar
By Donald J. Boudreaux: "Last Friday, Feb. 8, marked the 10th anniversary of the death of the great economist Julian Simon. Although he never received the professional or popular acclaim of economists such as Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson or F.A. Hayek, Simon's insights and work rank with those of history's greatest social scientists."
Flex-Fuel Nonsense
By Jerry Taylor: "Congress can no more guarantee that fuel prices will go down from now until the end of time than it can guarantee a robust sex life for fat, balding, middle-aged men. Fuel prices are subject to supply and demand curves that do not answer to Congress — particularly in global energy markets."
Global Warming: Risks and Consequences
"Last fall, at the Reason in DC conference, one of the most strongly attended and memorable panels was titled "Climate Change: Risks and Consequences" and featured Lynne Kiesling, a senior lecturer in economics at Northwestern University, proprietor of the blog Knowledge Problem, and an expert in retail electricity markets; Ronald Bailey, reason's longtime science correspondent and author of, among other books, Liberation Biology: The Moral and Scientific Case for the Biotech Revolution and ECOSCAM: The False Prophets of Environmental Apocalypse; and Fred L. Smith, Jr., the founder and president of Competitive Enterprise Institute."
Unintended Consequences
By Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt: "But with a government that is regularly begged for relief — these days, from mortgage woes, health-care costs and tax burdens — and with every presidential hopeful making daily promises to address these woes, it might be worth encouraging the winning candidate to think twice (or even 8 or 10 times) before rushing off to do good. Because if there is any law more powerful than the ones constructed in a place like Washington, it is the law of unintended consequences."
Congress Strong-Arming Baseball? That's Foul.
By Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch: "First, Major League Baseball, along with other sports leagues and private-sector ventures, simply should not be required to submit their business plans -- much less blood and urine samples -- to Congress or any other government body."
Dismal Science Sees Upbeat Future
By Alexander Tabarrok: "Forget the talk of recession. The world is about to enter a new era in which miracle drugs will conquer cancer and other killer diseases and technological and scientific advances will trigger unprecedented economic growth and global prosperity."
The Failure of U.S. Organ Procurement Policy
By T. Randolph Beard, John D. Jackson, and David L. Kaserman: "In this article, we calculate how many lives will be lost if the United States continues in its current policy course. We do this to motivate policymakers to stop implementing one ineffectual policy action after another and attack the organ shortage with more effective weaponry in the form of financial incentives."
In 2008, a 100 Percent Chance of Alarm
By John Tierney: "Today’s interpreters of the weather are what social scientists call availability entrepreneurs: the activists, journalists and publicity-savvy scientists who selectively monitor the globe looking for newsworthy evidence of a new form of sinfulness, burning fossil fuels."
Drug Use and the Candidates
By Stanton Peele: "There has been massive drug and underage alcohol use by Americans over the years -- more than 110 million Americans, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, have used illicit drugs. Yet the overwhelming majority of them -- like Messrs. Bush, Clinton and Obama -- have grown up to be productive citizens. Some believe there's no need to know about their youthful misconduct."
Not So Hot
By Patrick J. Michaels: "If a scientific paper appeared in a major journal saying that the planet has warmed twice as much as previously thought, that would be front-page news in every major paper around the planet. But what would happen if a paper was published demonstrating that the planet may have warmed up only half as much as previously thought?"
The Great Depression: Is an epidemic of depressive disorder really sweeping America?
By Will Wilkinson: "The alleged epidemic of depression simply doesn’t exist. Horwitz and Wakefield are right: Millions who have been diagnosed with major depression never had it in the first place, even if their lives were nonetheless improved by the drugs they were prescribed."
The Great Global Warming Swindle
"The most disturbing part of the movie, and what makes it worth spending the hour-plus to watch it, is the way it portrays the momentum of the global warming crusade. When you have lots and lots of people heavily invested in a point of view, how can they possibly change?" - Arnold Kling
WHO's Watching Over You
From Agoraphilia. The WHO rankings, by purporting to measure the efficacy of healthcare systems, implicitly takes all differences in health outcomes not explained by spending or literacy and attributes them entirely to healthcare system performance. Nothing else, from tobacco use to nutrition to sheer luck, is taken into account.
35 Inconvenient Truths
We now itemize 35 of the scientific errors and exaggerations in Al Gore’s movie. The first nine were listed by the judge in the High Court in London in October 2007 as being “errors.” The remaining 26 errors are just as inaccurate or exaggerated as the nine spelt out by the judge, who made it plain during the proceedings that the Court had not had time to consider more than these few errors. The judge found these errors serious enough to require the UK Government to pay substantial costs to the plaintiff.
Drew Carey Defends Medical Marijuana
"I think it’s clear by now that the federal government needs to reclassify marijuana. People who need it should be able to get it – safely and easily," says The Price Is Right and Power of 10 host Drew Carey in a new Reason.tv video examining medical marijuana and the war on drugs.
The Tragedy of the Commons and the Implications for Environmental Regulation
Bruce Yandle of Clemson University and George Mason University's Mercatus Center looks at the tragedy of the commons and the various ways that people have avoided the overuse of resources that are held in common.
Green Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
By Roger Bate: "There is little more annoying for a policy analyst than when two types of wrong-headedness conspire to undermine his case. Such is the case for policies driven by the pursuit of a pesticide free -- or at least pesticide diminished -- future, which will cause an increase in insect-borne disease. "
Vaccination Bill Mutates
Sigrid Fry-Revere, Director of Bioethics Studies at Cato, writes about the new HPV vaccine, and why states should not mandate it.
A Short Course in Brain Surgery
By Stuart Browning. In A Short Course in Brain Surgery, filmmaker Stuart Browning shows the callousness of "single-payer", government-run health care systems as practiced in Ontario, Canada. His film highlights the plight of Lindsay McCreith, an Ontario man with a cancerous brain tumor who went to Buffalo, NY to receive the timely medical care that is rationed in his home country.
Behind the Baby Count
By Bernadine Healy, M.D.: " We're a nation of beautiful babies. In a remarkable achievement, the loss of babies during their first year of life has plummeted by almost 70 percent since 1970. Yet the nation's infant mortality rate is used time and again as evidence of America's failed health system."
Uninsured in America
By Stuart Browning: "Uninsured in America examines the conventional wisdom that 45 million Americans cannot get health insurance and consequently do not have access to health care."
What Do We Really Know About the Spread of AIDS?
By Emily Oster. Emily Oster, a University of Chicago economist, looks at the stats on AIDS in Africa -- and comes up with a stunning conclusion: Everything we know about AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa is wrong. We look for root causes such as poverty and poor health care -- but we also need to factor in, say, the price of coffee, and the routes of long-haul truckers. In short, there is a lot we don't know; and our assumptions about what we do know may keep us from finding the best way to stop the disease.
Our Priorities for Saving the World
By Bjorn Lomburg : "Given $50 billion to spend, which would you solve first, AIDS or global warming? Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg put this question to economists and students around the world, and the answers they came up with may surprise you. Ranking our toughest problems not on any moral scale but simply by how effectively they can be solved, Lomborg and his colleagues demand we take a fresh look at doing good."
Chill Out
By Bjorn Lomborg: "The discussion about climate change has turned into a nasty dustup, with one side arguing that we're headed for catastrophe and the other maintaining that it's all a hoax. I say that neither is right. It's wrong to deny the obvious: The Earth is warming, and we're causing it. But that's not the whole story, and predictions of impending disaster just don't stack up."
Gore's Noble Challenge
By Patrick J. Michaels: "Where else -- except perhaps via the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, which Gore negotiated -- can someone accomplish so little while spending so much? But, to get there, or at least to the Demo nomination, Gore's going to have to do something he has assiduously avoided: debate."
The Double Standard in Environmental Science
By Stanley W. Trimble: "My experience suggested to me that ideology, not science, had established a significant grip on the top scientific press. This article attempts to portray the emotionalism, exaggeration, and even ideological viciousness — qualities that to me define extremism — that have invaded the field of environmental science."
The Truth About Medical Marijuana
By Steve Chapman: "The mystery is not why anyone believes cannabis can be safe and effective therapy. The mystery is why so many politicians, particularly Republican presidential candidates—Ron Paul, a physician, being the heroic exception—are unwilling to consider the possibility, or to leave the matter up to the states."
CSI: Mississippi - A case study in expert testimony gone horribly wrong
By Radley Balko: "During the last two decades, there have been more than a dozen high-profile cases in which dubious forensic witnesses conned state and federal courts, sometimes for many years and in hundreds of cases."
Universal Suffer-age
By Tom Elliott: "The last few years have demonstrated that rare is the place politicians are unwilling to tread in the name of public health. Universal coverage will complete this governmental mandate to control American lifestyles."
Global Warming: No Urgent Danger; No Quick Fix
"Fact: The average surface temperature of the Earth is about 0.8 C warmer than it was in 1900, and human beings have something to do with it. But does that portend an unmitigated disaster? Can we do anything meaningful about it at this time? And if we can't, what should or can we do in the future?"
Taming the Hurricane
"Anyone concerned about climate change should take a lesson from Hurricane Dean. Even if storms like this become more frequent in the future, people will adapt and survive if they have the financial resources. How silly it seems to take those resources away in futile attempts to "stop global warming""
Is the Sky Really Falling? A Review of Recent Global Warming Scare Stories
By Patrick J. Michaels: "Reports of rapid disintegration of Greenland’s ice ignore the fact that the region was warmer than it is now for several decades in the early 20th century, before humans could have had much influence on climate."
On Earth Day, Remember The Humans
By Indur Goklany: "On Earth Day, we should renew our promise to keep the environment clean—without adding to human misery or stalling improvements in the human condition."
Five Myths of Socialized Medicine
While our health care system is more market-oriented than in most industrialized nations, we don’t really have a free market in health care in the United States. Half the spending is done by government. Most of the rest is done by bureaucratic institutions."
A Better Way to Protect Endangered Species
Laura E. Huggins argues that for wildlife conservation to be successful, negative restrictions on landowners must be replaced with positive incentives.
The Common Law: How it protects the environment
"The purpose of this PERC Policy Series paper is to show, by examining specific cases in American and English history, that strong legal traditions enabled ordinary citizens to protect their air, land, and water, often against politically potent parties."