For starters, let's have California secede and limit Bernie-style socialism to the new republic. If my predictions ended up being wrong and the state became a paradise, then the rest of the country could quickly follow suit.
Economics today poses as a predictive discipline which fails to correctly predict anything; a prescriptive discipline which prescribes the wrong policies; and an empirical discipline which collects data but misses the point.
Was healthcare a natural right two hundred years ago? If so, how is it that this "right" to eighteenth-century medicine morphed into a right to MRIs and chemotherapy? Do rights change with technology? That's not how rights work.
The great libertarian psychiatrist Thomas Szasz warned that health officials could use their "expertise" to push a political agenda. We're now living in that world.
The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas is a lively history of the astonishing influence prewar Viennese intellectuals had on the greater world, and continue to have in areas far beyond economics.
Trade agreements have thus become obsolete tokens of negotiation in larger geopolitical disputes, protectionist tools for managing and interfering with global trade flows.
