Yet another great letter by Don Boudreaux: Dear Olivia Jane: You and many readers of Daily Kos are furious that Whole Foods CEO John Mackey expressed – in the pages of the Wall Street Journal – his opposition to greater government involvement in health care. Exercising your rights and abilities as consumers, you are therefore [...]

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 [...]

THIS BOOK IS BASED on a single idea: You should be allowed to do whatever you want with your own person and property, as long as you don’t physically harm the person or property of a nonconsenting other. Thus begins a book that everyone interested in politics should read; Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do: The [...]

The purpose of society is to help people satisfy their needs. A major means used to satisfy needs are economic activities such as production, trade, and the performance of services. In a complex economy, it is easy to lose sight of this, and people begin to believe the fallacy that the purpose of an economy [...]

Over at the Master Resource Blog,  law professor Gail Heriot points out the similarities between global warming, fear-monger Al Gore and Xhosa Prophetess Nongqawuse: Nongqawuse was a teenager and a member of the Xhosa tribe in South Africa.  One day in April or May of 1856, she went down to the river to fetch water.  [...]

It’s time to impeach Obama; indict him, and his entire administration, for fraud, coercion, extortion, influence peddling, and grand theft under the color of law, amongst hundreds of other charges. It is not simply the auto issue; but that is currently the most visible. This is no hyperbole. I am not simply spouting off. I [...]

I was listening to the local talk show host on my way to work this morning and the topic was the ongoing saga surrounding the auto makers. This particular talk show host is a very pro-union “buy American” (and therefore anti-free trade) kind of guy in the mold of Lou Dobbs. As I pulled into [...]

This one is a bit topical for me. My wife and I just had our taxes prepared by her business accountant. As mentioned last year, she and her sister started a business, and due to the myriad obstacles and pitfalls inherent in our legal system, incorporated the business as an S Corp. Being a first-year [...]

The trainwreck that is the Obama administration continues with his support for caps on executive pay. This bad idea has been tried before, and had the disastrous result of enhancing the power corporations wield over their employees, particularly with upper and middle management. It contributed to many of the instances of corporate malfeasance. The problem [...]

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 [...]

Would that we had an articulate defender of freedom in Congress as Daniel Hannan, Minister of the European Parliament for South East England. Here is a video of him confronting the Prime Minister of England. The truth, Prime Minister, is that you have run out of our money. The country as a whole is now [...]

Just over two years ago, I offered a worst-case prediction of where this economic crisis could lead. Wait, though, it gets worse. America isn’t an empire in the conventional sense of the word, but we are an economic empire. The dollar is the currency of the world, from middle eastern oil to the reserve currencies [...]

As I have said here before, I am a senior technical executive at a large bank. As it happens, a bank that was forced at gunpoint, by the secretary of the treasury and chairman of the federal reserve, to accept TARP funds (as all the top surviving banks in the U.S were). Let me be [...]

The Economist Free Exchange Blog, responding to this pro-protectionism piece by Joe Weisenthal, half-heartedly suggests that maybe Joe meant that a little infant industry protection for green industries is in order: I wonder if he is suggesting some sort of infant industry type policy to stimulate domestic manufacturing of more enviromental products. Interesting idea, but [...]

From a NYT story about new banking regulations attached to the bailout funds (and the desire for some of these banks to now return the money): The list of demands keeps getting longer. Financial institutions that are getting government bailout funds have been told to put off evictions and modify mortgages for distressed homeowners. They [...]

My apologies to those who have already read this, but for those who haven’t this is just too good not to share. Since December 2008, the Knox e-mail to GM has been making its way to inboxes all over the world; I learned of it only yesterday when listening to Neal Boortz yesterday. Within an [...]

The desire of the NEA to kill the DC Voucher program is well-covered, including by my co-contributor Doug here. Now it seems that Congress has snuck in a provision for the Teamsters, to restrict Mexican truckers: Buried in the $410 billion catch-all appropriations bill now before the U.S. Senate is a provision that would end [...]

Many people have worried about the threat that China and India post to America by moving towards first-world economic powers. After all, they have, between the two of them, somewhere in the realm of 2.5B people, and if the same proportion of their students become engineers and scientists as we see here, they will be [...]

For those of you who believe that Libertarians focus too much on the War on (Some) Drugs, perhaps it’s time to pay attention to the escalating violence in Mexico which is spilling over into the U.S. PHOENIX (Reuters) – Hit men dressed in fake police tactical gear burst into a home in Phoenix, rake it [...]

Václav Klaus gave a speech that U.S. politicians would do well to listen to: The citizens of the Czech Republic feel that the European integration has an important and needed mission and task. It can be summarized in the following way: – removing unnecessary – and for human freedom and prosperity counterproductive – barriers to [...]