From the Mises Econ Blog, regarding Obama’s two most recent FTC nominees:
For those keeping score, with Brill and Ramirez the FTC will now consist of two law firm partners specializing in antitrust, one former state assistant attorney general for antitrust, a law professor who specialized in antitrust, and a former staff lawyer for the Senate’s [...]

Obama is not a dumb man. He understands that government provisioning generally produces a worse service than private organizations which are dependent on people choosing to patronize them.
Here he is pointing out that while Fedex is required by law to charge higher prices than the Post Office for equivalent services, it is the Post [...]

Imagine a private school where students sat in a math class for weeks misbehaving and learning nothing. Imagine that school gets on TV news because the administrators suspended the young lady who blew the whistle by taking a cell phone video and giving it to her mom who confronted them. Do you think [...]

Kevin Drum recounts a tale of a specific charter school that has had excellent results. He unwittingly makes a good argument for school choice:
In a nutshell, this story explains pretty well why I like charter schools [snip] So I say: fine. If there are some parents who want their kids to go to [...]

The Obama administration, rather than dealing with the root cause of the violence along the Mexican border, has decided to adopt a policy to deal with the symptoms. The problem is that this policy will neither alleviate the symptoms nor come close to treating the problem.
WASHINGTON – The Obama administration promised Tuesday to help [...]

Orrin Hatch is undoubtedly merely responding to his constituents’ demands with this nonsense. The Utah Utes finished 13-0 last season, with notable wins over Michigan, Oregon State, ranked teams TCU and BYU, and a BCS bowl defeat of Alabama. It’s a pretty impressive resume. They were the only undefeated team in Div [...]

One of the bizarre fallacies propounded by President Obama, the Congressional leadership, and their intellectual enablers such as Paul Krugman, is the notion that society should be organized to give people jobs, and that if the supply of jobs is insufficient to meet the demand, the government should step in and create an additional supply [...]

Back in the day, antitrust regulators decided that including a browser with an operating system was an unfair competitive measure. But to this day, they’ve only ever enforced this against Microsoft, and the EU is still pushing:
European antitrust regulators have told Microsoft Corp. that the company’s practice of including its Internet browser with its [...]

Many progressives are looking forward to increased government oversight over the auto industry. They see this as a chance to influence the types of vehicles that are produced and to dictate that production be turned to socially beneficial uses, including the manufacture of green cars that auto manufacturers are not manufacturing. These vehicles [...]

The City Club of Cleveland extended an invitation to the top six presidential candidates*. Of the six candidates, Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr, Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin, and independent candidate Ralph Nader participated; Democrat Barack Obama, Republican John McCain, and Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney were no-shows.
Unlike the debates we have already seen [...]

Recently I had an interesting conversation with someone who leveled the following accusation:

“You libertarians don’t care if people die from lack of medicine, or if someone can’t afford a doctor.  Libertarianism is the freedom to die from a cold while the doctor who could treat you is doing a checkup for a rich guy who [...]

After Joe Wurzelbacher became the star of the Wednesday night’s debate, the media started looking in to his background and it didn’t take long for someone to discovery that Joe the Plumber doesn’t have a plumber’s license.
Now, Wurzelbacher admits that and say that, because he works for someone who has a license, he isn’t [...]

The left hand says
Existing Legal Drugs Provide Superior Treatment for Serious Medical Conditions
The FDA has approved safe and effective medication for the treatment of glaucoma, nausea, wasting syndrome, cancer, and multiple sclerosis.
Marinol, the synthetic form of THC (the psychoactive ingredient contained in marijuana), is already legally available for prescription by physicians whose patients suffer from [...]

In a thread at Reason’s hit and Run, during a discussion where Enron was cited as an example of what happens when governments fail to regulate private behavior, frequent commenter fluffy wrote an insightful comment which is well worth reading in full. The second half of her comment read:
It is customary in the US [...]

This week Boston’s Mayor Menino testified before the Congressional Task Force on Illegal Guns. He had this to say:
We share a common disdain for what we have seen happen in our cities, to our residents and to our police officers as a result of illegal guns. So, we signed a statement of principles [...]

On Reason’s website, Radley Balko has a great takedown of the Post Office’s hostility to the so-called ‘Do-Not-Mail-List’, which would prohibit the U.S. Postal Service from sending junk-mail to people who register themselves as not wanting junk-mail.
The U.S. Postal Service is opposing a “do not mail” list for junk mail because . . . well, [...]

From the Economist, a nice little story about government regulation and all the benefits costs to society.
In the wild, horses eat tough grass that naturally wears down their teeth. In captivity, they are fed softer food they can eat more quickly, so their teeth grow unchecked. Unless filed down—a process known as “floating”—they can grow [...]

Earlier, Doug posted a story about an expansion of freedom in the taxicab market in Minneapolis. It seems that someone finally asked why it was necessary to set an arbitrary limit on the number of cabs operating in the city, and that someone was able to muster enough power to end the restriction.
Perhaps NYC [...]

The guys at the Institute for Justice are among the unsung heroes in the fight for liberty.
Here are a bunch of lawyers dedicated to little more than fighting laws and regulations that restrict the ability of people to run their business, or even to go into business. They’ve been on the winning side and the [...]

Tim Rutten, writing for the LA Times made several interesting observations regarding talk radio, MoveOn.org, and the way congress has responded to commentary coming from each.
[T]he House and Senate censured the liberal activist group MoveOn.org for taking out a newspaper advertisement that characterized Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. military commander in Iraq, as [...]