Under the "leadership" of Dr. Thomas Frieden, the Centers for Disease Control has fought smoking and obesity, built bike lanes, conducted "Zombie Preparedness Drills," argued gun violence should be treated as a public health issue. When CDC was established in 1946 (as the Communicable Diseases Center), it was created for the explicit purpose of protecting Americans from dangerous epidemics. CDC isn't very good at that. Virtually every assurance Dr. Frieden made about Ebola isn't true. Most alarmingly false was CDC's claim any U.S. hospital with an isolation ward could treat Ebola patients safely. Only four hospitals in the entire country are fully equipped to treat the deadly disease. Most are woefully unprepared. Such ridiculous (and dangerous) ineptitude is not an aberration in our ridiculously vast federal bureaucracy -- it's the norm.  We need a 10th Amendment solution for it.

What is the maximum income-tax rate that anyone should be expected to pay? Some questions are never settled, in part because people often ignore the theoretical and empirical evidence, and history that can help answer the question. The question of what an optimum income-tax rate would look like is one of those questions. Rather than attempt to answer it, political demagogues merely shout: "It is only fair that the rich pay more." Back in 1971, a Scottish economist by the name of James A. Mirrlees wrote a groundbreaking paper, in which he attempted to answer the question of what an optimum income-tax regime would look like if one desired to reduce inequalities while at the same time not discouraging work and economic growth. Up to the time of Dr. Mirrlees' work, no one had been able to figure out the optimum trade-off between equality and efficiency. Dr. Mirrlees was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1996 for his work, and was knighted in 1998.  Here is what he won his Nobel and knighthood for.

After a Liberian man brought the deadly disease to America last month, Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control, assured us: "We'll stop Ebola in its tracks." CDC has protocols in place to protect against further spread of the disease, he said. File that assurance alongside "you can keep your health plan it you want to," and "ISIS is a jayvee team." Our unpreparedness for an Ebola epidemic makes it all the more imperative to bar entry to people from Ebola-ravaged countries. A quarantine is a must, experts say. But President Barack Hussein Obama won't impose one.  Why not? So far, just one person in America has died from Ebola. At least seven, mostly children, have died from Enterovirus D-68. There are more than 100 enteroviruses, ranging from the common cold to polio. EV D-68 has been very rare here. CDC has offered no explanation for this outbreak. EV D-68 is common in Central America, from whence came the flood of illegal immigrant children. The outbreak was first reported in communities to which they were sent.  CDC refuses to connect the dots.  Why won't it?

If you pay people not to work, what do you think they will do? In a new staff paper published by the New York Federal Reserve Bank titled "Unemployment Benefits and Unemployment in the Great Recession," the researchers found "that most of the persistent increase in unemployment during the Great Recession can be accounted for by the unprecedented extension of unemployment-benefit eligibility." The irony here is that President Obama and the congressional Democrats kept voting to extend the unemployment benefits, which had the effect of keeping unemployment far higher for a much longer time than if they had not done so. As the Fed researchers explained: "Our results lead us to expect that the stimulative effect of higher spending by the unemployed is largely offset by the dramatic negative effect on employment." The artificially induced higher unemployment caused economic growth and total output to be significantly lower. The high unemployment and slow growth are major issues in the upcoming election -- all working against the interest of the Democrats, who voted for this destructive policy. Some Democrats voted for the extended unemployment benefits in the name of compassion for the unemployed without thinking through the consequences -- particularly to themselves.