Mark Thornton is available for interviews. Send him email.

Hemp is a plant from the cannabis family that is often closely associated with marijuana. Marijuana or Cannabis indica and Cannabis sativa can contain high concentrations of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) which is a psychoactive component of marijuana, along with a large number of other cannabinoids. THC is the primary reason why humans have used these two forms of cannabis medicinally, recreationally, and ritually for a few thousand years.

I have been talking about the Housing Bubble in Norway for a while and about one year ago I wrote an article here. The story was picked up in by a variety of publications including here. It turns out that the bubble has spread over the entire Nortic region.

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Guest Post

Team Player: Robert Shiller on Finance as Panacea

Book Review by John Staddon

Shiller, Robert J. Finance and the Good Society. PrincetonUniversity Press. 2012. 304 pp.

The highly publicized glitches and failures associated with the launch of the Affordable Health Care Act have obscured the central role of the IRS in carrying out the law’s mandate. Stripped down to its essentials, Obamacare is not an “insurance” plan at all. It is rather a naked redistributionist scheme to coerce the young and the healthy into paying for the healthcare bills of the elderly and the sickly. This means that some agency had to be enlisted to penalize the young and healthy who refused to willingly participate in their own fleecing.

Now in mailboxes is the November issue of The Free Market, the Mises Institute’s monthly, featuring new articles on Sweden’s great depression and a wide-ranging interview discussing the progress of the Austrian Economics movement in Japan. On the front page, Per Bylund examines how Sweden, by shrinking its government in the 1990s, saved itself from a longer depression:

Not all of the arguments here are correct, but it shows you the declining validity of government statistics for real life. It is true that we obtain tremendous value from all the free goods of the digital age such as apps, Twitter, and Facebook and are not measure in GDP. However, they do forget to mention that Apple, Twitter, and Facebook do “spend” money into GDP when they buy things, hire workers, and pay the power bill. There ain’t no such thing as a free app.