[Excerpted from chapter 2 of Compulsory Medical Care and the Welfare State (1950)]

Obligatory health insurance started moderately enough — in Prussia. Compulsion under a law of 1845 was left in the hands of municipal administrations, with no government subsidy involved and no contributions from employers. The antisocialist law of 1878 suppressed many of labor’s voluntary associations for sickness benefits. The next step was the governmentalization of the associations’ functions.

Not long ago, many economists were convinced that monetary policy should aim at achieving “full employment.” Those who looked upon monetary expansion as a way to eradicate almost all unemployment failed to appreciate that persistent unemployment is a nonmonetary or “natural” economic condition which no amount of monetary medicine can cure.

When the first Austrian Scholars Conference was held in 1992, we were at the very beginning of the Great Bubble Economy, brought to you by Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke and their associates at the Fed. This shiny, bubbly “new economy” has finally gone the way of all bubble economies in history, deflating into stale dishwater and swirling slowly but surely down the recessionary drain. But it has left in its wake something truly amazing, something that never could have been foreseen: a second Austrian revival.

So says Big Copyright, which adopted the term for copyright infringers because of “its suggestions of theft, destruction, and violence.” But now, the “pirates”have “co-opted the term, adopting it with gusto and hoisting the Jolly Roger across the Internet (The Pirate Bay b

In my post today on Krugman-in-Wonderland, I take on Paul Krugman’s rosy predictions about the new “healthcare” bill that Congress is about to foist upon us.

Once upon a time, we had at least some expectations that Nobel Prize winners in economics would not turn into outright political shills. That time is long past, I’m afraid.

McGraw-Hill Construction economist Cliff Brewis says, “It is difficult to foresee a long-term recovery (of the economy) without single-family (homes) doing very well. It is a bellwether of how the marketplace will do because if you are building homes, you are going to build schools; if you are building homes, you are going to build retail; and if you are building homes, you will build roads.

One may say that, apart from wars and revolutions, there is nothing in our modern civilizations which compares in importance to [inflation]. The upheavals caused by inflations are so profound that people prefer to hush them up and conceal them.

—Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power

Jeff Riggenbach was born in 1947 to parents Frank and Dorothy Riggenbach. He received his undergraduate degree at Regents College and achieved his M.A. at California State University, Dominguez Hills. Mr. Riggenbach is also a jack of trades considering his extensive careers as a disc jockey, newsman, producer, anchor, cultural affairs reporter, teacher, book and music reviewer, and journalist and writer in such publications as New Libertarian, Reason, Inquiry, Books for Libertarians and Libertarian Review. Mr.