Health

The port city Gloucester Massachusetts Chief of Police announced that he was no longer going to arrest hard drug addicts and that indeed his police force would now work to help drug addicts get help

Economist Jeffrey Sachs is complaining that some new drugs cost "too much." But after we sift through all the intellectual property rules, the FDA regs, and the government subsidies, it's impossible to guess what a "correct" price for the drugs might be.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on 23 July 2015.

While doctors and nurses become more scarce, the number of health care administrators continues to go up. The role of these administrators is to aggregate and centralize data, although there is no evidence this increases the value of health care.

Fourteen years ago, when Portugal decriminalized most illegal drugs, drug war proponents claimed the move would drive Portugal into chaos. Today, Portugal has the second-lowest death rate from illegal drugs in Europe with no sign of chaos on the horizon.

Congress and the First Lady teamed up to impose the Healthy, Hungry-Free Kids Act on school children across the country, but news of unintended consequences abound.

Billions of tax dollars have been spent on scientific studies and public programs designed to tell Americans what to eat and how to be healthy. The experiment has failed, and we have nothing to show for it.

Medicine has gone the way of economics in preferring aggregates to specifics, although such methods do little to explain the needs of individual patients. On the other hand, the turn toward large-scale aggregation does help the government to centrally plan health care policy.

Those who want a higher minimum wage often claim it is necessary to combat a rising cost of living. However, these same people often support policies that raise the cost of living and drive real wages down.

The Supreme Court case of Michigan v. EPA illustrates how the law provides so many tools to federal agencies that their power is more or less unlimited. It's only a matter of finding which laws will stick, and the result is lawlessness.