Interesting blog bits

1. Al Roth on Corruption and kidneys in New Jersey and Brooklyn. Why not just have a legal market?
2. Seamus Hogan on Electricity Report: Who Paid the $4.3b? It would be useful to correct a misunderstanding in the way that the study has been reported in the press.
3. rauparaha asks Can free markets punish racists? Short anwser to rauparaha, yes, the more competitive the industry, the less discrimination.
4. Greg Mankiw asks Should we envy European healthcare? And then points out that Gary Becker argues no.
5. Oxonomics on The Political Economy of the Ninja. The idea is to explain the rise of the centralized Tokogawa state in early modern Japan. The ninja were local resistence fighters who were eventually crushed by the great unifiers Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the late sixteenth century.
6. Tim Worstall on How governments run things. Yes, the wise and omniscient beings face incentives, just like everyone else, and as everyone likes something for nothing they've set up a bookies so that it must (note, MUST) pay out more than it gets in plus the costs of doing so.