Barber Anarchy in Alabama

The Anniston Star reports a flood of letters to its offices about its editorial that blamed the Mises Institute for the lack of barber regulation in Alabama. But the paper isn’t backing down. It says that “regulation and private business aren’t incompatible.” Ironically, the paper cites a case a regulated industry, funeral homes, and how those regulations aren’t working — and proposes a solution of ever more regulation.

How the Free Market Would Handle Quarantines

Private businesses aren’t stupid; they don’t need the government to order them to keep lepers away, writes Robert Murphy. And if a particular church, say, wants to open its doors to such a person, that’s perfectly within their rights. Indeed, the final repository for such people would be buildings where the owners thought they could safely contain the disease. And the common name people would use for these buildings is “hospital.” In a free society, to be “quarantined” would simply mean that most owners (of roads, sidewalks, malls, hotels, factories, etc.) would refuse access, and so a contagious person would have few choices outside of treatment facilities.

WSJ: Lack of Civil Liberties Breeds Terrorism

An article in today’s Wall Street Journal quotes a Princeton economist discussing the causes of terrorism: “There is no evidence of a general tendency for impoverished or uneducated people to be more likely to support terrorism or join terrorist organizations than their higher-income, better-educated countrymen,” he said. The Sept. 11 attackers were relatively well-off men from a rich country, Saudi Arabia.

Culinary arts and communist leaders

The lovers of Liberty sometimes discount how hard the statists work. Certainly, we discuss and debate, and read and write, all in an effort to further the cause of Freedom. We grow hungry and need refreshment; that we accept. But, what about the socialists who are in the midst of economic and political plans that will exterminate close to 100 million? What do they eat to nourish their tired minds and bodies?

Whiny Journalists

There’s a brand of whiny, journalists who use nostalgia to attack the affluence that capitalism has bestowed on us.  Usually, they flash their columns on July 4th. Their gimmick is selfishness masked in childhood memories.  The scene is always one of youthful recollection; the bucolic picnic grounds, rippling lake, quaint rural paradise of their youth.

Floyd Arthur ‘Baldy’ Harper, RIP

On the evening of Saturday, April 21, Dr. F.A. “Baldy” Harper died suddenly, of a heart attack, at the age of 68. Murray Rothbard writes that Baldy’s death was an irreparable loss, personally and in every other way, to the libertarian movement, would be a masterpiece of understatement. Ever since he came to the Foundation for Economic Education in 1946 as its chief economist and theoretician, Baldy Harper, in a very real sense, was the libertarian movement. For all those years, this gentle and lovable man, this wise and Socratic teacher, was the heart and soul and nerve center of the libertarian cause.
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