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.
Economics is not intent upon pronouncing value judgments. It aims at a cognition of the consequences of certain modes of acting.
After very quickly becoming an advanced economy, South Korea is experiencing declining growth and labor productivity. The culprit, as usual, is government intervention in the market to favor certain interests.
Lew Rockwell reviews a newly released collection of Neil McCaffrey's letters and other writings, which reveal his relationships with members of the early libertarian movement such as Murray Rothbard.
Taxpayers are paying the disability pension of a "disabled" former cop who works full-time for the FBI and is classified as being in "excellent physical condition."
There is productive consumption and there is non-productive consumption. In the Keynesian mind, it's not necessary to produce anything, so long as people spend and consume endlessly, even to the point of destroying real wealth.
Experts who predicted economic doom as Brexit approached obsessed over the problem of "transaction costs" in trade. But the EU was imposing countless new transaction costs of its own.
All arguments in favor of mandatory service rest on the idea that an individual's life belongs not to him- or herself, but to the state.
In a large enough democracy, the impact of an individual vote is statistically zero on the margin.
Central banks have done nothing to end the boom-and-bust cycle. Instead, their unscrupulous interventions in credit markets just prolong the boom. But it's a huge mistake to assume that bringing market interest rates to zero will create a perpetual boom.
