Mises Daily Tuesday by Gary Galles:
The Jones Act and similar laws have been behind a precipitous decline in global American shipping. Passed for “national defense” purposes, such laws only serve to raise the cost of shipping to US ports while restricting consumer access to goods.
The harm that Britain’s protectionist Navigation Acts imposed on the colonies was a major impetus for the American Revolution. But the United States did not abandon those unjustifiable restrictions. Even before the Bill of Rights was adopted, Congress in 1789 enacted similar protectionist restrictions on coastal shipping. It is centuries past time to eliminate such harmful restrictions and the Jones Act that is their modern progeny.
A selection from 1988’s Man, Economy, and Liberty: Essays in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard, edited by Walter Block and Lew Rockwell.
The Political Importance of Murray N. Rothbard
by Ron Paul
Imagine that you need a cash loan to tide you over to your next paycheck, but banks cannot or will not lend to you. So you stop at a machine that looks very much like an ATM. You scan your passport photo, pose for a photograph, enter your cell phone number, and punch in the sum of money that you would like to borrow. Within 15 minutes you receive a text message indicating that your loan application has been approved and directing you to return to the machine and withdraw your cash.
In response to my article on Net Neutrality yesterday, some readers claimed that since ISPs are already regulated (i.e., granted partial monopoly power) then Net Neutrality is good. In short, their position is: there’s already regulation, so the answer is more regulation.
This week’s Mises Weekends:
Jeff Deist and Jay Taylor, host of Taylor’s Hard Money Advisers, discuss the role of Austrian economics in understanding the market crash of 2008.
That drop in the gas prices came just tin time. Ground beef was once a simple, basic, and easy source for protein. Now, not so much. But at least iPads are cheaper, right?
The average price of a pound of ground beef climbed to another record high — $4.235 per pound — in the United States in January, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
