Bureaucracy and Regulation

While we speak highly of “rule of law” and the “limited state,” the unfortunate truth is that the modern state is a law unto itself. 

Americans are increasingly unable to afford housing. For many young people, the “American Dream” seems out of reach. In moments of economic frustration, populists on both the Left and Right rush to identify villains.

World Cup tickets are a hot commodity with prices through the roof. Naturally, governments want to do what governments always do unsuccessfully: levy price controls.

Bob Murphy makes the case that American healthcare's dysfunction is not a market failure but a pricing failure manufactured by government. He closes with practical reform proposals designed to restore market signals without waiting for Washington.

World Cup tickets are a hot commodity with prices through the roof. Naturally, governments want to do what governments always do unsuccessfully: levy price controls.

The essay added later to the collection: a critique of proposals to nationalize banking and credit, weighing bureaucratic against profit management and warning of credit overexpansion and immobilization.

What was once a symbol of American freedom and independence, automobiles are rapidly transforming into a high-tech cage that watches their every move and can override their decisions at will.

Ryan McMaken dismantles three persistent myths of American healthcare before tracing the origins of social insurance to Bismarck's deliberate scheme to bind citizens to the state "by the chains of gratitude" and closing with Mises' 1944 prediction that a population half-dependent on government healthcare would never vote to dismantle it.

As AI becomes a more important and visible part of our lives, the movement to regulate it also grows. The standard regulation narratives—that government regulates things in the name of the public interest—clearly do not fit the facts.

The free market facilitates mutually-beneficial exchanges that create wealth where it would not otherwise exist, but the market miracle can only exist under certain conditions.