In the weeks following the terror attacks, calls have come from politicians and journalists to "federalize" airport security by making workers who screen passengers and baggage government employees. House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt and others in Congress have declared that "passengers won't feel safe again" unless the government takes this step.
This past September, the state government of South Carolina came under fire for issuing a special license plate bearing the slogan "Choose Life." Affronted abortion-rights groups quickly filed suit, claiming that the state was violating the first and fourteenth amendments by failing to offer a "Choose Choice" or similar specialty plate. Florida's and Louisiana's "Choose Life" plates faced similar court challenges.
The poor security of U.S. airlines is a predictable outcome of government regulations and subsidies. Only through complete privatization of the industry will consumers be able to fly cheaply and safely.
Almost any food you can name--if you study its history--has something to say about economics, politics, history, or culture. For whatever reason, tea seems to teach more lessons by its history than almost anything else we could eat or drink.
No government can live up to its billing as a semi-divine problem solver. Government intervention is not an alternative to the market; it merely creates a different kind of market full of con men selling very sour lemons.
We tend to think of trade as low-grade war with winners and losers, but the reality is otherwise. A vibrant trade in agriculture with the Third World would mean that the masses of people in both the developed and developing worlds would benefit.
Drug war-related injuries are bound to dominate the emergency room services of virtually all inner-city hospitals. And, although this incredible violence in America's inner cities is almost exclusively the result of the war on drugs, none of it should come as a surprise.
While the politicians and their media allies prattle on about "winners" and "losers" in the Microsoft antitrust case, they miss the larger story, one that has become a typical American tale: the ongoing assault of the Leviathan State upon the once free and productive business sector.
Following his first airline trip since the September 11 attacks, Mark Thornton gives his account of the federal government's attempts to regulate and regiment airport and airplane security.
What the Misesians have done in Guatemala is create an intellectual infrastructure that promotes a hard-core attachment to freedom among the business class, which dovetails very nicely with the working classes' instinctive opposition to taxes.
