Although some of the enthusiasm for bitcoin is driven by a distrust of state-issued currency, it is hard to imagine a world where the main currency is based on an extremely complex code understood by only a few and controlled by even fewer, without accountability, arbitration, or recourse.

Jason Brennan has in posts at Bleeding Heart Libertarians rendered a great service to supporters of a priori economics in the style of Mises and Rothbard, though this is far from his aim.1 To the contrary, he endeavors to show that a priori economics is untenable.

There was relatively good news for consumers in the Eurozone last week. Data released for the consumer price index (CPI) during October showed that the rate of inflation fell from 1.1 percent to 0.7 percent.

Editor’s Note: The following is adapted from Hunter Lewis’s new book Crony Capitalism in America, now available in the Mises Store.

Well, we probably all could see this one coming. The voters of Colorado voted to put taxes on the sale of newly legalized marijuana. The taxes add up to a 25% tax on marijuana consumers. However, marijuana prohibition probably increased the price of illegal marijuana by several hundred percent and people can always grown their own to avoid the taxes.

Mises Institute Senior Fellow Jesús Huerta de Soto has received the “Gold Hayek Medal” and a Prize of €10,000 from the Hayek Gesellschaft at the University of Göttingen (Germany) on June 21, 2013, for his outstanding contributions on Austrian Economics.

It’s even worse than a jammed website, canceled policies, and rising policy prices. The policies may also not be what they seem.

In the first place, exchange policies typically restrict the hospitals and doctors you can use. In New Hampshire, for example, 10 of the state’s 26 hospitals are excluded from exchange policies and this takes out all the doctors affiliated with those hospitals as well.

That so much importance is placed on the Fed chief’s temperament may seem absurd. But this indicates a much deeper problem: the Fed has too much power. The Federal Reserve is the most important economic planning agency in the world. It’s charged with promoting full employment, stabilizing prices, and overseeing the financial sector.