Among the many aspects of the race still shrouded in suspense are the future powers and responsibilities of the next president. A political deadlock prevented the drafting of a new constitution, paving the way for a power struggle between the new president, the elected Parliament and the self-appointed military council. The military council has said it will unilaterally issue an interim constitution before leaving power, but it has not yet done so. It was unclear how elected leaders might respond.

For more on Egypt and the political dynamics shaping the country, you may find this interview of interest.

• Nanny State Snack Attack
• Why You Need to Read Some Good Business Biographies
• Yaron Answers: Isn’t CEO Pay Unjustifiably High?

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US banking luminary John Allison – who is unafraid to speak frankly about the grim reality of the financial crisis – delivers the ASI’s prestigeous Ayn Rand Lecture in the City of London on 21 June.

While others blame bankers’ bonuses or credit derivatives, Allison believes the root problem is that banking is not capitalist enough – as demonstrated by the multi-billion bank bailouts and the fact that interest rates are set by central banks rather than by the market.

• Dr. Anthony Youn, a plastic surgeon in Detroit, comments on a recent report that found many doctors unsatisfied with their level of income, offering a personal experience to illustrate one reason why doctors are frustrated with their salaries. If Dr. Youn’s experience is commonplace, it’s a profound injustice–doctors save our lives and just like anyone else who performs a service for us, we owe them payment in return.
• Sarah Kiff of the Washington Post describes a new online service by which patients can comparison shop for health care—the site allows you to compare the prices doctors are charging and lets you see how patients have rated their doctors.
• A recent study found that two drugs—Avastin and Lucentis—do an equally good job of treating those with age-related macular degeneration (AMD), an eye disease in the elderly that can lead to blindness. The study was requested by the government because a dosage of Avastin costs far less than a dosage of Lucentis, so if the drugs are equally effective, requiring physicians to prescribe Avastin for AMD can save Medicare a lot of money. The article notes, however, that Avastin users in the study suffered more complications than Lucentis users, and manufacturers of the drugs maintain that the two compounds are different enough that some patients may benefit from one while others may benefit more from the other. If you are an AMD patient who might fare better with Lucentis, you’re out of luck if the government mandates only Avastin can be used to treat the ailment. This kind of conflict inevitably occurs when the government is paying for your health care and so it gets to decide which treatments it will pay for. If seniors were responsible for funding their own care, they could purchase whichever treatment that, in consultation with their physician, looks the most promising for them.
• A fascinating article in the New England Journal of Medicine about how surgical techniques have evolved and improved in the last 200 years.

• Freedom, Dependency, and the Avengers
• Yaron Answers: Is Apple Exploiting Chinese Workers?
• Why Making Altruism Voluntary Can’t End the Entitlement State

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• Why We’re Born Poor and Why Some Become Rich
• A Desperate Defense of Capitalism?
• The Soul of Occupy Wall Street: Part 1 and Part 2

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• Legislators and health care leaders are trying to figure out what to do about the shortage of physicians in Arizona. Whenever I hear about a lasting shortage, I suspect government interference in the marketplace because shortages don’t last very long on a free market (check out my post from earlier this year about how government controls in the drug market are contributing to the severe shortage of critical drugs). When it comes to physician supply, as this article points out, the government is very much involved—for example, the federal government funds most residency slots and has capped the number of slots for the last fifteen years.
• Businesses are learning that ObamaCare will substantially increase their health care costs and some may consequently drop coverage for their employees (at least 30% of employers are expected to do this ).
• Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute details some of the latest concerns with ObamaCare, including how it is contributing to the student loans crisis making headlines recently.
• It’s widely recognized that Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are in fiscal crisis. This New York Times article highlights another, lesser known entitlement program that is on the verge of collapse: disability insurance.

During the Iraq war — especially during the “surge”– battalion commanders were “were allocated packets of $100 bills and authorized to use them for anything from repairing a schoolhouse to paying off ex-rebels and paying blood money to the families of innocents killed by U.S. forces.” Washington poured as much as $4b into this kind of effort to “improve relations” with Iraq. There’s a lot wrong, in my view, with paying off “ex-rebels” to stop killing Americans, and in my book I criticized this tactic at length. At the time it was hailed as a stroke of military genius. From a new audit of the Commanders Emergency Response Program (CERP), we learn that: “the report is detailed evidence that at least a portion of CERP in Iraq may have fed the insurgency these funds were aimed at stopping.”

Here’s another angle on what our policy bought us in Iraq.

img: flickr/U.S. Army

But the problem is the FDA itself, not its current budget.

The FDA has no business coercively keeping drugs, devices and other therapies off the market before it deems them worthy. By what right does the FDA force innovative companies like Regenerative Sciences to take a “time out” on the procedure they spent years developing and testing so that the FDA can play catch-up to the new technology? By what right does the FDA make it illegal for Americans to use their own cells until bureaucrats give permission?

The FDA, by its nature, treats innovators as guilty until proven innocent—what’s a bigger extinguisher of innovation, in terms of the costs and time involved for gaining regulatory approval, than that? And the FDA forces the rest of us to abide by its collective edicts, rather than our own doctors’ assessment of risks and benefits in our own, individual medical circumstances.

According to Eschenbach, “Regulatory approval is the only bridge between miracles in the laboratory and lifesaving treatments.” It’s time to dismantle that bridge and establish a system by which the government puts on trial only cases of demonstrable fraud, not all promising therapies.

• Don’t Mess With Prices
• What To Do About Social Security
• It’s the Spending, Stupid

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