“Medicare for All.” “Healthcare is a right, not a privilege.” “You will never be denied treatment under single-payer healthcare.”

These are some of the slogans that you will hear from politicians, including all current Democratic presidential candidates. In the most extreme versions of “Medicare for All” plans, such as that advocated by Bernie Sanders, private health insurance would be eliminated in favor of a government-run, single-payer plan.

A week ago, I sent to my editor my review of Tyler Cowen’s latest book, Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero. The book is outstanding. There are valuable facts and/or bits of economic reasoning on virtually every page. To give you an idea of how much I liked the book, I titled my review “A Love Letter to Tyler Cowen.” I’m not sure the editor will use that title. 

Using census microdata on multistate firms and their organizational forms, we estimate the impact of state taxes on business activity. For C corporations, employment and the number of establishments have short-run corporate tax elasticities of −0.4 to −0.5 and do not vary with changes in personal tax rates. Pass-through entity activities show tax elasticities of −0.2 to −0.4 with respect to personal tax rates and are invariant with respect to corporate tax rates. 

A technical measure of the inflation expectations of eurozone investors has fallen to its lowest level for three years, putting pressure on the European Central Bank to convince doubters that it is willing to use fresh stimulus to boost the region’s economy.