Prices are essential signals for coordinating the distribution of goods in an economy. Prices tell us where scarce resources are most needed. F. A. Hayek’s insights on this have been summarized by Peter Leeson:

Last week, Miami art gallery Art Basel sold, for $120,000, a piece of art composed of a banana duct taped to a wall. At least one other identical piece sold for a similar amount. A third piece was priced at $150,000. The banana used in the display is a real banana, and on Saturday, a performance artist named David Datuna ate some of it.

In a December 1 article entitled “Yes, Americans are Feeling the Squeeze. It’s Coming from Health Care,” Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson points out that “In the early 1960s, before Medicare and Medicaid, which were enacted in 1965, health spending was about 2 percent of federal outlays.

Just months after successfully threatening an illegal strike to obtain a modest salary raise, members of the Clark County, Nevada, teachers union, the Clark County Eduation Association (CCEA), are going to have to give a big chunk of that back, thanks to a pair of recent rate hikes that will cost the average teacher nearly $1,000 a year.

The first hike came earlier this year, when the state’s Public Employees’ Retirement System (PERS) announced an increase that will cost the average Nevada teacher an additional $750 annually.

Mainstream thinking considers the central bank a key factor in the determination of interest rates. By setting short-term interest rates, the central bank, it is argued, can influence the entire interest rate structure by creating expectations about the future course of its interest rate policy.

[Review of Michael Rectenwald, Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom (Nashville, TN, and London: New English Review Press, 2019).]

Those who us who accept self-ownership and a Lockean account of property acquisition must face an important objection. In this account, self-owners occupy land and other natural resources, in that way acquiring exclusive rights to the land or resources. Once they done so, they may transfer their titles to the property they have acquired through exchange or gift, and they may bequeath it to their heirs. Once someone acquires property from someone who has initially acquired it, he may transfer it under the same conditions, and so on until we reach the present possessors of the property.

Today the Washington Post published a bombshell report titled “The Afghanistan Papers,” highlighting the degree to which the American government lied to the public about the ongoing status of the war in Afghanistan.

The Spanish philosopher, George Santayana (1863–1952) is usually credited with the phrase, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Nowhere is this truer than with the renewed idea and demand for the establishment of a socialist economic system.