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.
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?
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.
Mark Thornton speaks with Albert Lu about the recent violence in Ferguson and Baltimore and what can be done. Dr. Thornton discusses this in his most recent article, found here.
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.
What if you thought that the process involved in market mechanisms harmed society? That sizeable thumb on statist side of the evaluation scale could override other considerations and government intervention would “win” your endorsement even when it “loses.” In fact, by attributing a great enough weight to supposed harms from market processes, almost any government intervention could be argued to be justifiable. And even convincing demonstrations of government inadequacies and policy failures would do little to dent support for foolish interventions.
Mises Daily Thursday by Christopher J. O'Connell:
Some now blame employers that don’t pay a “living wage” for the fact that so many people receive welfare payments. So, the politicians want to tax employers for every minimum wage employee they hire. Needless to say, this won’t solve the problem.
