[Editor’s Note: This Q & A with Dr. Michel Accad, M.D. on the economic history of modern medicine covers the “pre-Flexner era” to the Great Depression. Part 2 will feature the period from the the Great Depression to today.]

Q: What is the starting point in the history of the American health care system?

A: The American health care system was born in the 1910s out of the so-called “Flexnerian reform” in medical education and the resulting licensing laws.

Experts increasingly agree that the TSA is inept and has not actually prevented any terrorist attacks on airplanes. Recently, Homeland Security sent a team to attempt to smuggle guns and bombs onto planes. The so-called “red team” succeeded on 67 out of 70 tries, or more than 95 percent of the time!

Released on May 12, the new film Brexit: The Movie makes the case for the “Leave” campaign in significant detail. At an hour and 11 minutes, the film sticks to the economic debate behind the Brexit campaign. This is wise since, as the vote approaches, the “Remain” campaign is likely to become increasingly hysterical with claims that leaving the UN will spell an economic apocalypse for Britain.

The city of Chicago had the highest urban bank rate failure during the Great Depression. A new study by Dr. Natacha Postel-Vinay just published in the prestigious Journal of Economic History uncovers the link between Chicago’s huge real estate boom and bust during the 1920s and the failure of the majority of Chicago’s banks in the early 1930s. In her article “What Caused Chicago Bank Failures in the Great Depression?” Dr.

Title & Author Cumulative Index

The war on cash is now a global phenomenon: under the pretext of tracing criminal activity, governments everywhere are cracking down on commerce that isn’t monitored or controlled.

However, the results of this war reveal its true purpose: tracking citizens and their taxable income.

Venezuela is in a state of complete crisis. The country has been forced to face the horrors of hyperinflation, food shortages, and devastating depression. In spite of having the world’s largest oil reserves, the country has had to resort to rationing electricity. A horrifying article by the New York Times depicts the state of Venezuelan hospitals, with children dying by the day due to a lack of medicine and basic supplies.  

Gresham’s Law

Government imposes price controls largely in order to divert public attention from governmental inflation to the alleged evils of the free market. As we have seen, “Gresham’s Law”—that an artificially overvalued money tends to drive an artificially undervalued money out of circulation—is an example of the general consequences of price control. Government places, in effect, a maximum price on one type of money in terms of the other.