Writes Regina Herzlinger in today’s Wall Street Journal ($): “With the effective passage of the Medicare drug bill, we have just vastly enlarged the health-care sector. This is the one-seventh of our GDP that is run Soviet-style: where the doctors who are uniquely qualified to create and manage health-service businesses are prohibited from owning
The NYT’s Floyd Norris marvels this morning (registration required) at the increased importance of self-employed workers in the government’s rosy employment figures announced this week. These workers, notes Norris, account for 6.6 percent of the workforce, up from 6.1 percent when Bush took office. While there are about 2.25 million fewer jobs
The Motley Fool notes that Congress’ recent overhaul of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and especially its “No Credit Report Left Behind” provision, is yet another federal override of tougher state laws, such as California’s, where a new state law prohibited banks, insurance companies, and others from sharing their customers’ personal information.
...How much mutual funds should charge, how stock research should be marketed, that the EPA’s regulatory burden is too weak, the New York AG office deserves extorted penalties from securities firms more than the supposedly-harmed investors, the proper distribution of Red Cross funds, the correct result of voluntary labor contracts, which private
Dallas Fed President Bob McTeer, it seems, often breaks from promoting easy money policies in order to write poetry . Here is an excerpt: It would also be swell To be a member of the Committee on Personnel. A master of the universe I wanted to be That was important to me. But I’ve lowered my sights somewhat Since I’ve aged, and gone to pot.
From the great Spanish scholastic Juan de Mariana, writing in the late 15th century: “It is not rare for the iniquitous and equally useless suggestion of altering the value of money to be whispered in the king’s ear. With this measure, they say, no one will suffer direct harm. The intrinsic value of money will be lower, but the legal value will
Many thoughtful readers, responding to my Mises.org article “Mad Socialism Disease” , have pointed out that there is not much good science out there that supports the belief that anyone has died in Brtain due to Mad Cow, and that the widely held belief that this is the case is based on bad science and bad journalism. Writes Tony Baxendale: I am
The US Agriculture Department’s boorish manipulation of the mad cow scare last December is coming back to haunt it. Several reports are out today indicating that the single confirmed case of BSE at that farm in Washington State was not sick after all. Newsday reports that “[c]ontrary to the department’s account, three eyewitnesses at the
...Call your office. A reader wrote this morning in response to my Martha Stewart article on Mises.org: “[I]t is one matter to profess innocence when questioned by the media, it is quite another animal when someone intentionally sets out to deceive the public by voluntarily proclaiming their [sic] innocence in order to prop up their [sic]
A new series on the Traffic Security Administration, running in the Seattle Times , reminds us of something that is obvious to anyone who has flown after 9/11: centralized government property protection is always a bad idea. An excerpt: Four months ago, at Houston’s William P. Hobby Airport, a conveyor belt jammed at 9 a.m. For 90 minutes,
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.