It’s been three weeks since four students at the University of Idaho were stabbed to death at a home in Moscow, Idaho, and law enforcement officers say they have no suspect. In the early hours of November 13, three women and one man were murdered in an off-campus home where two other roommates were also sleeping. Yet, somehow the killer or killers managed to escape the premises without being seen or even waking the other roommates.

In last week’s column, I discussed Christophers Coyne’s excellent book In Search of Monsters to Destroy, a cogent account of America’s endeavor to build a “liberal” informal empire. Coyne shows the inherent contradiction of using brutal means to achieve humane values. This week, I’d like to discuss an even more deplorable part of American foreign policy, one which threatens the world with destruction.

“It is not Wisdom but authority that makes a law.”

                               -- Thomas Hobbes

That meal, guest or package that came to your front door this month is part of a massive delivery industry. Free Range Entrepreneurs (FREs), drivers whose transportation work is varied, temporary, and frequently changing, are critical to our economy and all consumers. It is a national market with State rules. A self-regulating, wage clearing market, with high turnover.

[T]he confidence in the unlimited power of science is only too often based on a false belief that the scientific method consists of a ready-made technique, or in imitating the form rather than the substance of scientific procedure, as if one needed only to follow some cooking recipes to solve all social problems. 

— Hayek, F. A., The Pretence of Knowledge, Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 11, 1974.