Weekend Reads 11/9/19

Democrats give Warren's 'Medicare for All' plan the cold shoulder

The proposed elimination of private insurance and its trillions of dollars in tax hikes are prime reasons Democrats cite for rejecting her approach.

Many Democratic senators said they prefer an optional government-run insurance plan, known as a public option, more along the lines of what former Vice President Joe Biden and South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg are proposing.

Does Joker Belong in a Mental Hospital?

As others have already noted, Joker delivers problematic stereotypes about sufferers of mental illness. Joker is “sick” and hence prone to horrific acts of violence stereotypical of “crazy” people. As Annabel Driscoll and Mina Husain note, “the psychopathology Arthur inhabits is foggy at best…This diagnostic vagueness may create a more relatable character that reflects the pain of any psychiatric illness; but it gives the impression that many disorders have been squashed into a plot device.”

How Climate Politics Undermines Climate Science

In some ways, climate change is a problem uniquely ill-fitted for American society and politics to resolve. Almost everything it seems to implicate — cars, beef, oil, suburban sprawl — is American. The average right-leaning climate skeptic probably wonders, perhaps even unconsciously, “how could it be that a genuine scientific theory would just-so-happen to perfectly cry out for left-wing policies and precisely target my preferred way of life?” From that perspective, climate change looks like too good a problem to be true.

Antitrust 101: Why everyone is probing Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

In modern analyses, regulators are concerned not necessarily with competition for its own sake, but rather with the negative effects that follow when competition disappears. A market with little-to-no competition tends to see prices go up while the quality of the product and service degrade, affecting not only individual consumers but also suppliers and commercial buyers at every level.