[Originally published 12/17/2013 as a Mises Daily article.]

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” declared philosopher George Santayana.

The U.S. “health care cost crisis” didn’t start until 1965. The government increased demand with the passage of Medicare and Medicaid while restricting the supply of doctors and hospitals. Health care prices responded at twice the rate of inflation (Figure 1). Now, the U.S. is repeating the same mistakes with the unveiling of Obamacare (a.k.a. “Medicare and Medicaid for the middle class”).

Last month, former Vermont governor Howard Dean announced that “hate speech is not protected by the first amendment.” Specifically, Dean was opposing a proposed speaking engagement for columnist Ann Coulter, whose ideas are apparently so offensive to Dean, that even the most fundamental freedoms cannot be allowed to endure. 

President Trump is about to embark on his first foreign trip, where he will stop in Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the Vatican, before attending a NATO meeting in Brussels and the G-7 summit in Sicily. The media and pundits have loudly wondered why hasn’t he gone on a foreign trip sooner. I wonder why go at all?

Emmanuel Macron is the new president of France. The 39-year-old political shooting star got 66.1 percent of the votes in the second round of the presidential election last Sunday. His opponent, Marine Le Pen, secured just 33.9 percent of the votes. 

As Ludwig von Mises noted, unrestrained immigration is not without its downside. This is due to the fact that linguistic and cultural majorities have a habit of using the political system to exploit the linguistic and cultural minorities. As these majorities change due to migration, this can lead to political conflict.

To advocate any clear-cut principles of social order is today an almost certain way to incur the stigma of being an unpractical doctrinaire. It has come to be regarded as’-the sign of the judicious mind that in social matters one does not adhere to fixed principles but decides each question “on its merits”; that one is generally guided by expediency and is ready to compromise between opposed views.