Canadian law, like U.S. law, bans the buying or selling of human organs, but doesn't specifically address donations by complete strangers, writes Adam Young. The transplant monopoly insists living donors be either family or close friends. The result is a massive shortage which results in needless deaths. A market could so easily fix the problem, so why is this solution rejected?
Economists talked blithely of privatizing Iraqi assets, writes Joseph Stromberg, without considering the bureaucratic implications of the method, the motivations of the public authorities, the long and disgraceful history of imposing a pre-set view of what constitutes a free market, and the reality that dividing up assets in a conquered country is probably contrary to international law. There are better ways to bring freedom to the world.
In 2003, one in 35 million U.S. cattle were confirmed to have mad cow disease. Infected cattle comprised three millionths of one percent of all cattle. So why the mad cow scare? As Christopher Westley tells us, it reflects an implicit consensus among the body politic that the federal overseers of the U.S. beef industry are not capable of stopping the spread of mad cow once the slightest hint of the disease shows itself on U.S. soil.
The gym has Fox television on, and perhaps I should be grateful, because otherwise it would not have dawned on me just how popular and widely embraced stupid is.
The government sets price its flu shot at zero and then wonders how to account for shortages. That's just the beginning of the long history of government errors concerning the flu, writes William Anderson. In the flu pandemic of 1918-1919, an estimated 500,000 Americans died of Spanish Influenza. The outbreak coincided with the last days and the immediate post-armistice days of World War I, with government actions guaranteeing that the flu would spread rapidly.
Today's neocons genuinely believe that the key to durable peace is establishing democracies throughout the world. Two problems here: first, it will require lots of warring and, second, even if achieved it will fail because peace depends on governments abandoning unlimited interventionism. As Mises said, "The tragic error of President Wilson was that he ignored this essential point."
A common accusation against libertarianism, writes Llewellyn Rockwell, is that we are unnaturally obsessed with tracing social and economic problems to the state, and, in doing so, we oversimplify the world. If you let the people who say this keep talking, they will explain to you why the state is not all bad, that some of its actions yield positive results and, in any case, the state should not always be singled out as some sort of grave evil.
Using "backwards induction," writes Robert Murphy, economists can come up with conclusions so counterintuitive that not even the theorists entirely believe them. Instead, they put their faith in the "Nash Equilibrium" and declare the results true and irrefutable. Only one problem: the whole exercise rests on fallacy.
Laurence Vance offers a critique of John Merrifield's school voucher proposal. If the public school system were abolished, or even rendered irrelevant, what would be the point in collecting tax money from all citizens and redistributing it to those who have school-age children? How is this any different from a Great Society redistribution scheme? In short, Merrifield's "competition" and "choice" could, in practice, amount to vast wealth redistribution and another layer of educational central planning: not choice but market-based socialism.
