Some Links

• Kevin Erdmann has an excellent post about unemployment.
• Alex Tabarrok brings our attention to the news that India is adding a "none of the above" option on their future ballots. How might such an option play out in the United States, I wonder?
• Tyler Cowen supplies us with this Bloomberg link that looks more or less like an ObamaCare "fact check." Cowen calls it "very good," but I would call it "just okay." The author should have reduced the number of points and only addressed those for which she had strong, tangible arguments.
• Speaking of health care, Donald Boudreaux discusses the impossibility of economic price calculation when health care prices are socialized. This is a good companion piece to my recent point about ObamaCare.
• I link to this Anti-Gnostic post not because it's interesting, but because it's deplorable. The point is clear: he's saying that European peoples have accomplished more than non-Europeans because there is less in-breeding in Europe. It is a theory supported by nothing other than the graphs he supplies, and steeped in ethnocentrism. The Steve Sailer crowd would prefer I not call this racism, but what else do we call it?
• Here's a brief, interesting point about the Misesian approach to economics that I think plays well into my rules-versus-merit framework. 
• This baffling Penelope Trunk post about Huma Abedin highlights (unintentionally) the left's need to turn leftist politics into some combination of religion and fairy tale. Here I must exclude the far left, which has a much less romanticized view of politics and politicians, and that gives me the sickening feeling that the centrists in America are more wrong than the extremists on any end of the political spectrum. But maybe this just means that Americans are finally starting to shrug off the shackles of the Democrat-Republican false dichotomy, and each one of us is coming to that point of view our own way, some from extreme leftism, some from extreme rightism, some from extreme libertarianism, and so on.

Well, that ought to get you all caught up on the blogosphere after my two-week absence!