A rare snowstorm here in North Carolina put me at a largely vacant headquarters yesterday with just enough uninterrupted time to polish off two books on my “to be read” stack. I recommend both to thoughtful conservatives seeking to brush up on the details of two domestic-policy issues of great political saliency: health care and transportation.

The first is The Top Ten Myths of American Health Care: A Citizen’s Guide, by Pacific Research Institute CEO Sally Pipes. Originally a Canadian, Pipes is particularly effective in critiquing the purported desirability of single-payer or government-controlled insurance systems in other countries. Many of the comparisons you see, both on cost and on health outcomes, leave out critical data and define the terms in ways that distort the policy lessons to be learned.

One major reason why medical services appear to cost less in Europe, for example, is simply that thanks to government cram-down policies, physicians and nurses earn a lot less than their American counterparts do: the average doc in Italy earns about 27 percent what the average U.S. doc makes in a year. In Germany and France, the percentage is about 18 percent. One explanation is the relative lack of specialty care in those countries. Another is the reimbursement system. Essentially, while in America certain tradeoffs and resource constraints in health care show up as dollar spent, in countries with greater governmental control they show up as long waiting lists and adverse health outcomes (the lower age-adjusted death rates in Europe appear to be entirely explained by the lower incidence of homicides and traffic accidents, the causes of which may be debatable but aren’t likely to be found in the health care financing system). None of which is to say that the American system doesn’t need fundamental reform — and that it doesn’t waste money, including often paying overpriced docs to do what physician assistants and nurse practitioners should be doing — only that systems in Canada, the U.K., and elsewhere have even greater defects.

My other recommendation is Mobility First: A New Vision for Transportation in a Globally Competitive Twenty-First Century, by the Reason Foundation’s Sam Staley and Adrian Moore. Lots of great data and valuable background on U.S. transportation policy in here, but two themes deserve particularly emphasis: 1) the massive and too-often-overlooked costs associated with endemic traffic congestion, some of which are imposed intentionally by state and local Smart Growth activists in an effort to force high densities and transit use; and 2) the value of investing wisely, not just copiously, in new transportation assets, including flexible routes, coordinated traffic signals, and systems for responding quickly to stalled or wrecked vehicles to get them out of the way.