“Americans are fatter than ever,” CNN reports in its examination of the latest National Health Interview Survey by the Centers for Disease Control.

This will surprise no one who has been paying any attention at all to obesity data in the US in recent years.

In a recent piece called “Monopoly’s New Era,” professor Joseph Stiglitz has divided the long history of economic thought into two camps explaining the distribution of income: those who believe in competitive markets and those who believe in “market power.” The former tradition evolved into explaining incomes in terms of marginal prices, whereas the latter is focused on explaining two real world problems: rising inequality and higher concentrati

The late Murray Rothbard was known as an uncompromising libertarian theorist. But he was also an activist and strategist, and wrote several articles, essays, and memos on the topic of advancing libertarianism. I’m happy to report that some of his previously unpublished work on strategy will be released later this year by the Mises Institute, and will be edited by no less than Rothbard’s biographer Justin Raimondo.

Regarding tactics, Rothbard advocated a two-prong approach :

The Journal of Libertarian Studies
An Interdisciplinary Review

Volume 16, Number 4, Fall 2002

Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Symposium Introduction

Walter Block
Henry Simons is Not a Supporter of Free Enterprise

Murray N. Rothbard
Milton Friedman Unraveled

[Editor’s Note: This Q & A with Dr. Michel Accad, M.D. on the economic history of modern medicine covers the Great Depression to modern times. Part 1 covers the “pre-Flexner era” to the Great Depression.]

Q: What alternative models of health care payment were sought during the Great Depression?

Aprioristic reasoning is purely conceptual and deductive. It cannot produce anything else but tautologies and analytic judgments. All its implications are logically derived from the premises and were already contained in them. Hence, according to a popular objection, it cannot add anything to our knowledge.