Mises Wire

Uber, Lyft, and similar rideshare companies represent a direct threat to state-controlled taxi cartels and their (increasingly unsellable) medallions.

Judge Napolitano points out that if government is spying on everyone, it's not spending it's time on spying on those who are most likely to actually use violence against others. 

Contemporary supporters of an expanded role for government are increasingly moving away from calling themselves liberals toward referring to themse

Mario Rizzo suggests that if you want to be remembered as an economist, you should be an Austrian.

The New York Times reports on how the Japanese internment camps are passing out of living memory, and how imprisonment impacted the economic and physical lives of the prisoners. 

Are bees really dying off, and can the government solve the problem? 

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.

Our guest on Mises Weekends this week is uniquely qualified to discuss modern progressives from a libertarian perspective. Jim Ostrowski, whom Murray Rothbard called "one of the finest people in the libertarian movement," is a lawyer, writer, activist, and chronicler of progressive dysfunction in his native New York. He's the author of Progressivism: A Primer on the Idea Destroying America, which explains progressivism more as personal psychology than a coherent view of the world. If you're interested in how progressives managed to capture the 20th century, stay tuned.

Mp3 file here. 

Mises Daily Friday by Christopher Casey:

It is now commonplace for governments to measure economic prosperity with GDP metrics. Numerous arbitrary rules and faulty assumptions behind these measures, however, skew our view of how economies grow and living standards improve.

Today's is Joe Salerno's birthday. He is an outstanding Austrian economist and Academic Vice-President of the Mises Institute.