Chiomsky uses banks as an example — but the banking industry has huge barriers to entry - he faults banks for having bad customer service. But why should they have good customer service? If they become insolvent, as they have done — they’ll just be bailed out. Chomsky seems to be under the impression that banks are working within a market framework .They don’t care about their customers because they don’t have to.

A little over a year ago, Canadians were alarmed by the surging loonie. As the argument went, foreigners (and Americans in particular) couldn’t afford to buy Canadian-made goods. Since the country couldn’t compete, better get the Bank of Canada on the job and inflate so as to depreciate the dollar. One year on and people got what they wished for. The loonie has lost about 7% of its value against the Greenback, and nearly 15% since 2012.

The discussion over Scotland’s possible secession has often touched on the issue of regional net tax payments as a decisive issue in secession decisions. That is, if a region is a net tax-receiving region, then there is little incentive to secede, whereas, a net tax-payer region has significant incentive to secede.

A recent paper published in the prestigious Journal of Political Economy, “Crime and the Depenalization of Cannabis Possession: Evidence from a Policing Experiment,” reports on experimental policing in the city of London. In the experiment, police depenalized the possession of small quantities of cannabis in the London borough of Lambeth.

A couple of months ago I wrote about Mike Watts, the businessman who built a private toll road to replace a public road destroyed by a landslide.