The Market is Taking Over Sweden’s Health Care
Sweden is turning to markets and private payer insurance for answers to their state-run health care.
Turning Their Backs on Sweden’s Welfare State
As noted by e.g. Reason.com, Yahoo! News recently reported that Swedes are increasingly turning their backs on their globally lauded utopian welfare state. While very little known, Sweden’s welfare state “worked” through the early 1970s thanks to deliberately preserving capitalist institutions and expanding its scope at a slower rate than the country’s overall economic growth.
We Win the NY Times Prize
The NY Times, like its columnist, Paul Krugman, is upset at the Mises Institute. Why might that be? Because we’re making so much progress with the young against Keynesianism, the warfare state, and other evils.
Binswanger on Anarchism
Harry Binswanger, a leading Objectivist philosopher, advances a simple argument that he thinks suffices to undermine libertarian anarchism. The argument is found in his article of January 24 for Forbes, “Sorry, Libertarian Anarchists, Capitalism Requires Government.”
Economics and Value Freedom
Mises and Rothbard taught that economics is a value-free science. Propositions of economics, such as the law of diminishing marginal utility, neither state nor imply any judgments about what is good or bad, right or wrong. Robert Grant, an Irish philosopher who teaches at Trinity College, Dublin, disagrees.
A “Quasi” Bank Run in Motion
HSBC has apparently stopped letting customers withdraw more than £5,000 from their British bank accounts unless depositors can provide evidence of “why they wanted it.” According to the BBC:
Stephen Cotton went to his local HSBC branch this month to withdraw £7,000 from his instant access savings account to pay back a loan from his mother.
A year before, he had withdrawn a larger sum in cash from HSBC without a problem.
Free Market a Better Alternative than Government
Here I go over the moderate view of libertarianism with Henrik Palmgren from Red Ice Creations. I explain why the welfare state creates poverty by creating non-intact families and I go over how the government subsidizing unemployment
gives incentives for unemployment that would otherwise not be there in a libertarian world.
http://www.redicecreations.com/radio/2014/01/RIR-140117.php
Walter Block on the ‘We Are Libertarians’ Show
Here I speak to Chris Spangle and Dan Peffers from the We Are Libertarians Show. I go over Nevada and its’ current laws on prostitution. I speak about free market environmentalism and the history of government laws actually permitting trespassing by way of pollution. I also make a clear distinction between the free market and contracting out.
Video: Ron Paul on Police Statism and the Future
Recorded at the Mises Circle Southwest Regional in Houston, 18 January 2014. Includes an introduction by Jeff Deist.
Wall Street and Main Street in Fiction and Film
A good story, told through a novel, play, or film is more likely to affect one’s views of economics and human nature than is any well-footnoted and didactic tome.
