In November 2000, Clinton signed a bill passed by Congress that ordered the states to adopt new, more onerous drunk-driving standards or face a loss of highway funds. That’s right: the old highway extortion trick. Sure enough, states passed new, tighter laws against Driving Under the Influence, responding as expected to the feds’ ransom note.

Drunk driving is ever in the news (Paris Hilton arrested) and the news typically conflates the non-crime of drunk driving with the real crime of actually hurting people and injuring property with a car. So it’s a good time to revisit my 2000 article calling for the legalization of drunk driving.

You would think that given how important commerce and entrepreneurship have been in America, there would be many films celebrating the entrepreneur. After several years of working on the film page and receiving hundreds of recommendations for films I had come up with a grand total of one on entrepreneurship: the wonderful Tucker. Thanks to an astute reader, I have now added one more, Boom Town.

Yes, I know that headline could cover just about every action of the political class since the advent of the nation-state, but somehow the crack down on internet gambling strikes me as particularly egregious. If this story is right, the government is pretty well demolishing a vast industry and for no good reason. Producers, consumers, and everyone else involved will all have the quality of their lives diminished.

WASHINGTON - Amid signs that the Taliban insurgency is regaining strength, President Bush on Friday defended his efforts to stabilize war-savaged Afghanistan and blasted critics who charge that his policies there are failing. More wildly implausible assertions here.

Murray Rothbard was always so gentle in his disagreement with his mentor, Ludwig von Mises.

1. They disagreed on natural rights;
2. they disagreed on the necessity of the State; and
3. they disagreed on foreign policy (based, I suspect, on disagreements #1 and #2)

What might seem at first to be the least significant is (4) their disagreement on the best strategy for educating the public:

A nice gift from the WSJ today, the 125th anniversary of Mises:

The Caribbean island of Cuba has recently been experiencing a strange outbreak of dengue. This may have resulted in hundreds of deaths throughout the island, something the Castro regime has done little to acknowledge the outbreak. Doctors at hospitals have also been dying from this disease leaving fewer individuals to properly treat patients. José Antonio Fornaris of writes that

[Cross posted at Organizations and Markets]