The Republicans have a problem. Healthcare prices are so swollen by government imposed monopolies that most people cannot possibly afford to pay the crazy bills without subsidies. What to do?

Example: my son recently went to an out-of-state emergency room for food poisoning. The bill came in at over $8,000. And how is this for fairness: our insurance company knocked it down to about $4,000. An uninsured person would have been liable for the full amount. Might even have faced bankruptcy for failure to pay it.

In 1982, Murray Rothbard published a lengthy article titled “Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution” which laid out a free-market, private-property-based approach to environmental issues. Discussing air pollution Rothbard concluded:

If A is causing pollution of B’s air, and this can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, then this is aggression and it should be enjoined and damages paid.

The Curse of Cash
Kenneth S. Rogoff
Princeton University Press, 2016

Kenneth Rogoff would sharply disagree with Peale, a character in the 1915 novel It Pays to Advertise, who said that the most beautiful word in the English language is “cash.” For Rogoff, a distinguished monetary economist (and chess grandmaster) who teaches at Harvard, cash, especially in large denominations, ought to be eliminated.

For the sake of peace and prosperity in the world, the US should take the true leadership role in proving to the world that free trade and non-interventionism are all that is required. In other words, all nations should simply mind their own business and set good examples. Just as laissez faire policies work within a nation’s boundaries, free cooperation between individuals of different nations will quickly reveal which policies work and which do not.

Economists understand very little about how technological progress occurs. —Alan Greenspan

[This article is adapted from Mark Thornton’s upcoming book on the skyscraper curse.]

Today is the official start of NFL free agency, when teams begin filling their rosters with new players for the upcoming season. This, along with the NFL draft, is one of the biggest days for pro football’s “business season” which is followed as closely by most NFL fans as the games themselves. This time of the year, however, is not only a great subject for discussion at your favorite sports bar, it is a great illustration of economics in action.

In an address delivered at the recent Mises Institute conference in San Diego, Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne posited that classical liberalism is the operating system for Western Civilization. It is an operating system based on consent: in this OS, free people make free choices to advance their individual interests, and evolve sub-systems of consensual exchange and governance that result from their individual behaviors.

The recent news in the Bitcoin world is China’s building attempt to regulate and oversee its use to a point where it is rendered nearly useless for Chinese consumers. They’ve realized that they can’t truly kill it per se, but they can regulate the exchanges to a point where they can effectively stymie ts attractiveness.