The press says that the nation was transfixed by a spaceship-like balloon last week that was supposedly carrying a young child, with press and police chasing this thing for miles, but then it turned out to be a hoax. Not having been among the transfixed - I had never heard of this until yesterday - it strikes me as a testament to the gullibility of the press to have seized on this to begin with.
The problems of the American healthcare system are caused entirely by the fact that the government subjects the system to massive interventions, some of which are fascist in nature, while others are socialist.
Sometimes market actors make you wonder about the truth provided by economic theory and if it really applies to the real life market. One would think that firms competing for customers should do what they can (actually, all that they can) to provide better service at lower prices – and protect their customers from disturbances, problems, and delays.
But that does not apply to the airline industry.
We wrote UCLA oral history for permission to continue to host this transcript of interviews with F.A. Hayek, rebuilt for us because the version on their site is ridiculously huge, but sadly they have refused to give us permission to host it, so it must be taken down.
[This article was first published in the Fall 2009 issue of The Intercollegiate Review.]
It is a cliché that if we do not study the past we are condemned to repeat it. Almost equally certain, however, is that if there are lessons to be learned from an historical episode, the political class will draw all the wrong ones — and often deliberately so.
It is striking that the major resurgence of Scholastic ideas came out of Austria in the late 19th century, a country that had avoided a revolutionary political or theological upheaval. If we look at Menger’s own teachers, we find successors to the Scholastic tradition.
