Mark D. White

Writer, editor, teacher

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about

I’m a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the College of Staten Island/CUNY, where I teach courses in philosophy, economics, and law, and the author/editor/co-editor of several books.

Category: Newspapers

  • Health care and the Constitution: On the individual mandate and pre-existing conditions

    Mark D. White As you may have heard, U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson ruled Monday that the part of the Affordable Care Act (the health care reform bill passed earlier this year) dependant on the individual mandate to purchase health insurance is unconstitutional. From his ruling (as reported by The Wall Street Journal): "At…

  • Questioning Economic Forecasting (Finally)

    Mark D. White There's a fantastic article in The Wall Street Journal today by Mark Whitehouse (!) explaining how, given the current crisis, more economists are finally starting to doubt the efficacy of mathematical modeling to predict movements in the economy. Of course, some want to build even bigger models, but others, such as Roman Frydman and…

  • Free markets versus perfect competition (Wall Street Journal letter to the editor)

    Mark D. White Today The Wall Street Journal printed my letter in response to a recent piece by Tim Wu (linked below), in which I reiterate an argument from my paper providing a Kantian critique of antitrust (from the Journal of Private Enterprise): A Free Market Means That It's Free for All   Tim Wu,…

  • Federal judge orders injunction against “don’t ask don’t tell” policy

    Mark D. White This afternoon, U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips ordered a worldwide injunction against the Clinton-era "don't ask don't tell" policy in the United States military, under which homosexual servicemen and women must keep silent about their sexual orientation. As I wrote earlier, this demeans our proud men and women serving their country, both…

  • New York City attempts to ban using food stamps to buy soda

    Mark D. White When it rains… As the New York Times and many other news organizations have reported, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg (together with New York State governor David Patterson) are petitioning the U.S. Department of Agriculture for permission to block the city's 1.7 million food stamp recipients from using the funds to…

  • Elizabeth Warren, simplification in lending, and competition

    Mark D. White Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, special adviser to the secretary of the Treasury for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal this morning (subscription may be required), in which she argues that simpifying consumer credit products will please both consumers and lenders and will promote competition. After…

  • No, Professor Krugman, Economics Is a Morality Play

    Mark D. White I usually try to ignore Paul Krugman, but sometimes I can't. (Sorry.) Thanks to Steve Horwitz (here and here), I lit upon Krugman's September 28 New York Times blog post, "Economics Is Not a Morality Play," in which he writes: The market economy is a system for organizing activity — a pretty good…

  • Wall Street Journal letters on health care, privacy, and choice

    Mark D. White I thought the first two letters to the editor in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal were excellent, reinforcing a point made in my chapter from Accepting the Invisible Hand: Market-Based Approaches to Social-Economic Problems on markets, dignity, and health care (see this previous post): Dr. Sally Satel helpfully describes some of the factors inhibiting…

  • An unintentional survey of the ethics of gays in the military in the WSJ

    Mark D. White In today's Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens has a piece arguing why the GOP should let "Don't Ask Don't Tell" (DADT) lapse in the 2011 Defense Bill, and in it he happens to cover the three mainstream approaches to ethics: consequentialism (DADT forces the expulsion or rejection of qualified, eager men and…

  • Roberts on the role of economics (and philosophy)

    Mark D. White I don't know how I missed this article, but thanks to the great folks at Coordination Problem and Cafe Hayek, I saw it, and it confirms so much of what I tell my students, especially in macro, as well as my intuitions regarding the proper role of economics. The piece is Russ Robert's "Is the Dismal…