John Stossel, More Health Insurance is Not the Answer

Obama and his Senate allies would limit competition by requiring insurers to cover everyone for the same "fair" price. No "cherry picking," the president says. No charging healthy people less.

They call this "community rating," and it sounds fair. No more cruel "discrimination" against people who ( Read more... )

For those who are interested, a quick and impartial primer on how the Government tries to "manage" the economy, followed by my own satirical analysis of its effects:

Economics and Crisis

The Federal Government utilizes two methods in its attempts to manage the economy.  The first is “fiscal policy,” in which Congress itself (often guided by the ( Read more... )

When Does Coordination Require Centralization?

The subtitle says it all:

Contrary to expectations, decentralization might be the best strategy when the need for coordination among divisions is paramount

That's right.  Three "experts" from the top business school in the country have spent (probably copious amounts of) time and money to demonstrate the ( Read more... )

It has been 50 years since the initial publication of Leonard Read's I, Pencil.  If only today's political "leaders" would read it and take its lessons to heart, we'd be out of our current economic mess in very little time.  And as long as I'm dreaming, I'd like a yacht.

"I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe, a claim I ( Read more... )

For the economic case against interventionism and the government's downright asininity, we turn to Bob Murphy's Open Letter to Gary Becker re: Depressions:

"the business cycle is an unintended consequence of government intervention in the monetary and banking system. Specifically, the central bank (the Federal Reserve in the United States) pushes ( Read more... )

 Always one to plug a friend (at least when I agree with him), here's Bob Murphy's latest article on the counter-intuitive but nonetheless true fact that Perpetual Trade Deficits Can Be Good.

"The elementary point is that a current account deficit (a slightly broader term that includes the trade deficit) is the flip side of a capital account ( Read more... )

My friend Bob Murphy recently penned an interesting article for the Ludwig von Mises Institute on the "trade deficit" and the state of the dollar on the international scene.  Bob is a libertarian anarcho-capitalist and an Austrian economist, and that school rarely gives much credence to the idea of a trade deficit, so I was rather surprised to see ( Read more... )

Should The U.S. Impose Limits On Incredibly Stupid Shit?

"With national stupid-shit consumption at an all-time high and federal shit projections indicating sharply rising levels of stupidity over the next decade and a half, a small but vocal group of lobbyists has revived an old debate on Capitol Hill, calling for strict, federally mandated limits ( Read more... )