Hillary Clinton’s latest pitch, from today’s New York Times:

We need a president who is ready on Day 1 to be commander in chief of our economy.

God help us.

Two months ago, the Manhattan Institute’s Sol Stern ignited an educational firestorm when he declared that, contrary to his past hopes, school choice cannot save American education. Only a focus on classrooms and curricula can do that, he argued, going so far as to laud a “thought experiment” that found a dictatorship with a “rich curriculum” preferable to universal school choice.

Even before Stern’s article went online the responses came fast and furious, especially from people at Cato. Afterward, it generated even more heat, pulling folks from all sides into the debate. For the most part, though, the dispute has been fought long-distance, with combatants hurling op-eds and blog entries at each other. But that is about to change…

On April 16, Cato will be hosting a policy forum putting Mr. Stern, Cato’s Andrew Coulson, Gary Huggins of the Aspen Institute’s Commission on No Child Left Behind, and University of Texas at San Antonio economics professor John Merrifield on the same stage to debate the big question: Is school choice enough to fix American education, or are government standards the key?

On April 16, the big debate comes to Cato. Sign up here to attend!

I wrote two months ago that I thought that Hillary Clinton “can credibly claim to be the best-prepared presidential candidate since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940: she spent eight years in the White House, seeing the way politics and policies work from the eye of the storm. ” But in the past couple of weeks her attempts to press this argument have not worked out very well. The Washington Post awarded her a full “four Pinocchios” for telling a real whopper about coming under sniper fire when she went to Bosnia. David Trimble, former First Minister of Northern Ireland, scoffed at her claims to have been directly involved in peace negotiations there. And Gregory Craig, former Clinton White House counsel, also dismissed her claims to have played a leading role in any specific foreign policy issue.

Which is hardly surprising for a first lady. It was a mistake for Hillary to pick two minor foreign policy issues and claim to have been the key player, rather than to emphasize her experience in being at her husband’s side as he dealt with a whole range of issues. And that I do think is significant. It’s the kind of experience that makes Washington graybeards feel that people like Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, who have been both elected officials and White House chief of staff, would be admirably prepared to be president.

First ladies typically pursue a “first lady’s agenda” and of course talk to their husbands at night in the family quarters. I do think that more than any other first lady, Hillary was in the room when decisions were being made–more like Bobby Kennedy than Jackie. She saw the pressures on a president, the ways a president balances politics and policy, the consequences of decisions made under pressure. That’s valuable experience, far more significant than visiting 79 countries to tour historical sites and deliver prepared speeches on women’s rights.

Another Washington Post article manages to undermine most of her specific claims but does include this defense from Mike McCurry, which I think finally gets it right:

Yet she lived through those episodes with a vantage point few get. “I would not say she was sitting there planning cruise missile attacks,” said former White House press secretary Michael McCurry, who supports her candidacy. “But you’re there and you see and you understand the requirements of leadership.… Having lived through it even as a spouse, you absorb a lot.”

None of this should be construed as an endorsement of Hillary Clinton. Experience — or charisma — devoted to the wrong aims is not exactly an appealing prospect. But I think it’s valuble to focus on just what kind of experience Senator Clinton can really claim.

The new Newseum opens April 11th, and its an impressive project in many respects.

It’s a striking but tasteful modern building, with the text of the First Amendment inscribed on its front. The location on Pennsylvania Avenue close to the Capitol has a defiant quality that I admire.

As I walked past yesterday, I observed its display along the sidewalk of current front pages from newspapers around the country and world. It’s a tribute to the importance and vibrancy of the newsgathering enterprise and free speech. Tourists were gathered along the front of the building taking in the headlines.

But I don’t read newspapers. I get my news from a wide array of sources almost entirely online. Sooner or later, I thought as I walked, some state is going to punch a hole in the Newseum’s display, as the state will no longer have a newspaper. Soon enough, most people will get their news in new formats — as I do — from sources and in media of all kinds: blogs, email, traditional news outlets’ online editions, and so on.

Will the decline of the newspaper mislead people into thinking that our vibrant tradition of newsgathering and reporting is on the wane? It’s something to think about.

The “founding partners” of the Newseum are some of the oldest of the old-school establishment media figures. (Good for them, by the way, for supporting this worthy venture.) They and the Newseum’s leadership may think that things are changing for the worse when they’re changing for the better — when news is all around us, in dozens of different formats, provided by tens of thousands of subject-matter experts and on-scene reporters with true local knowledge.

The Newseum’s planned exhibits include room for new media, but by and large they lean toward exalting the newsgathering industry. That industry has had an important role, no question, but I think it is a role that will diminish over time. I hope the Newseum will actively pursue reporting on all the news, not just the news that’s fit to print.

Given the financial/​regulatory system that we have — which is a very important pre-condition — I grant the Fed and Treasury a TEMPORARY “coordinating” role to help tide over the current crisis. However, the initiatives and actions implemented so far appear unlikely to succeed.

I agree only with its role in the Bear buyout by JPMorgan. It is, by nature, a one-time action that does not protect Bear’s shareholders and operators but protects the financial system from unraveling further — similar to it’s actions re: LTCM. Even if it is repeated for another investment bank, it does not raise the issue of moral hazard because no such bank wants to end up like Bear.

However, the Fed’s new and almost direct support of mortgage backed securities through its primary dealers introduces another moral-hazard potential — likely to be a huge problem down the road, and especially because of the interest rate policy it is adopting.

Interest rate cuts are being overdone. Large cuts are continuing the Fed’s past mistakes of introducing greater uncertainty in market participants’ expectations. It is using the wrong (inflation fighting) tool to achieve its goal of systemic stability which has arisen from poorer visibility of asset quality. The added uncertainty will prolong the resolution of current credit/​liquidity shortages.

The longer that credit/​liquidity problems last, the more likely is the introduction of PERMANENT new financial market regulations — which would hinder efficient operation — in the very function that is key to resolving current credit shortage problems — the generation of price information.

Finally, Prof. Cowen’s recent NYT oped (“It’s Hard to Thaw a Frozen Market”) compares market pricing under capitalist and socialist systems. In brief, the argument is that socialist systems’ poor market pricing abilities appear to be reflected in the current credit-market woes of the American “capitalist” system. This comparison appears misplaced to me. The general U.S. economy may be relatively free and capitalist — but financial and credit markets are not quite so free.

Current credit market problems are not the result of pure and free market operation/​competition. We have a fiat currency whose supply and purchasing power is controlled by Fed interest rate policies. And it appears to have made serious mistakes in the process. This involves larger issues of whether asset prices should be objects for setting Fed policy and whether and how the Fed should respond to supply/​oil shocks. Fundamentally, however, financial market participants naturally don’t look to “the free” market to set their expectations about the dollar’s future purchasing power. Those expectations are set by a “central planner” — the Fed.

When I go to New York, I often ride the subways up and down Manhattan. Each ride costs $2. Usually I pay $10 for a MetroCard and get a $2 bonus, so you get six rides for the price of five. But on my most recent trip, to give a speech at the Manhattan Institute, I arrived at Penn Station and went to buy my $10 MetroCard–only to discover that the bonus is now $1.50 instead of $2. But what good is that? Now I get five rides for the price of five, and I have a card with $1.50 on it that won’t get me another ride. When I mentioned this discovery to one of the numerate journalists on John Stossel’s team at ABC News, he instantly pointed out that you have to buy four cards before you get your full bonus. After you buy four cards, you can get three bonus rides (instead of the four bonus rides on four cards under the old system). But meanwhile, you have to hold on to each card and trade it in for a new card, unlike the old system where you used the card up and discarded it.

It’s not the price increase that bothered me. I realize that each subway ride is heavily subsidized (less so in New York than in other cities), so I can hardly object to a price increase. It’s just the poke in the eye of promising me a bonus if I spend $10 at once, and then making that bonus extremely difficult to actually realize. And to think that some people want to turn our medical care over to such a system.

I just came across this letter I wrote to the editor of the Washington Post. Sadly, the editor declined to publish it. Since the Supreme Court just heard oral arguments about the D.C. gun ban and the meaning of the Second Amendment in District of Columbia v. Heller, it remains relevant:

On January 5, we learned that District officials filed a brief with the Supreme Court [“Gun Law Prevents Harm, D.C. Argues,” Jan. 5] defending the city’s gun ban on the grounds that: the Second Amendment does not protect an individual right to keep and bear arms; the ban “does not deprive the people of reasonable means to defend themselves;” and “less restrictive approaches would not be adequate.”

Fifteen pages later, Colbert I. King [“Outfoxed In the District,” Jan. 5] wrote of the “conditions that threaten the quality of life of all who live in this city: criminals roaming the streets in search of human prey; an apathetic and complacent government workforce; nonproducers ensconced in high places; and elected leaders who fall for snow jobs.”

Draw your own conclusions.