In a recent television interview, Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini, head of one of America’s largest health insurers, commented that selling insurance across state lines is “an outdated concept” in these days of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Bertolini went on to explain the rationale for his statement: “Insurance products are now tightly aligned with networks, so buying an insurance product from another state, that’s tied to a network in another state, really doesn’t work for people seeking care.”

The 2016 Summer Olympics in Brazil cost Brazilian taxpayers $4.6 billion, conservative estimates show. But once related expenses covered by the Brazilian government are factored in, the overall costs hit the $12 billion mark, which equates to about 0.72 percent of Brazil’s national budget.

In the next issue of The Austrian, David Gordon reviews Sebatian Mallaby’s new book, The Man Who Knew, about the career of Alan Greenspan. Mallaby points out that prior to his career at the Fed, Greenspan exhibited a keen understanding of the gold standard and how free markets work. In spite of this contradiction, Mallaby takes a rather benign view toward Greenspan. 

Last month, when President Trump issued his executive order banning refugees and visa holders from seven countries, the acting Attorney General Sally Yates refused to enforce the orders. 

In response, conservatives at National Review issued an unsigned editorial reminding the reader that 

Some of our assumptions are so deeply embedded that we cannot perceive them ourselves.

Case in point: everyone takes for granted that it’s normal for a country of 320 million to be dictated to by a single central authority. The only debate we’re permitted to have is who should be selected to carry out this grotesque and inhumane function.

Here’s the debate we should be having instead: what if we simply abandoned this quixotic mission, and went our separate ways? It’s an idea that’s gaining traction — much too late, to be sure, but better late than never.

It’s amazing how the same set of economic data can create two very different opinions on the overrated Fed Funds hike issue. In two Bloomberg opinion pieces last week, we see the stark difference:

Tim Duy: It’s Way Too Early for the Fed to Consider a March Rate Increase

Charles Lieberman: The Fed is Behind the Curve

A Conversation with Allen Mendenhall

​A frequent collaborator with the Mises Institute, Allen Mendenhall is associate dean and executive director of the Blackstone & Burke Center for Law and Liberty at Faulkner University and is the author of Literature and Liberty: Essays in Libertarian Literary Criticism (2014) and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Pragmatism, and the Jurisprudence of Agon: Aesthetic Dissent and the Common Law (2016).

Eugenics has haunted the social sciences for the better part of two centuries. Historically, as a social movement, its most ardent advocates were the progressives, while in economics its most famous champion was John Maynard Keynes.

When Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe made his famous argument against democracy back in 2001, the notion that voting was a lousy way to organize society was still radical even among many libertarians. Virtually everyone raised in a western country over the past century grew up hearing “democracy” used as a synonym for wonderful, good, just, and valid. It takes a great deal of unlearning to overcome this as an adult, and to question the wisdom of representative government installed via democratic mechanisms.