In the United States people who need medications to treat illness are dependent on the mercy of Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It serves as a gatekeeper to drug services, deciding which medications will and will not be available to consumers. The FDA demands that developers and manufacturers of drugs furnish data on a drug’s efficacy and side
Reading the thread on global warming below, I see a common mistake that pops up in a lot of arguments at the intersection of science and policy. With all due respect to the participants in the thread, they are largely talking past one another. This often happens in arguments over global warming, and I think there’s a specific reason for it: there
...That Congress is finally going to do something about gasoline price gouging. There’s really no commentary I could come up with that could improve on this article from the NYT. Consider it your entertainment for the
Jeff Tucker’s cold medicine post got me thinking. As the government’s creeping power to regulate all sorts of things continues to expand, for each new regulation you always hear the same argument: “But it’s really not a big deal!” There are always people ready to argue that it is not really a big inconvenience or a great restriction on your
Brought to you, surprisingly enough, by the New York Times, in an article describing how the crackdown on legal pseudoephedrine-containing medications has changed the black market for methamphetamine. One of the government’s hapless drug war strategies has been attacking drugs from the supply side, trying to cut off the sources (when they’re not
I remember when I was at Walter Block’s excellent Radical Austrianism, Radical Libertarianism seminar last summer, someone asked him if being an Austrian led people to become libertarians. Specifically, they were wondering how someone could not adopt libertarian views on something like the minimum wage once they understood the actual economic
Sez Senator Charles Schumer. The pharmaceutical company Merck is facing generic competition for its cholesterol-lowering drug Zocor. In response, Merck is cutting deals with insurance companies to offer lower copays on name-brand Zocor than the generic equivalent (it’s true that a copay is not the actual price of the drug, but it is the price
The idea that we need to be “self sufficient” when it comes to producing food just keeps getting more respect than it deserves. As Sallie James of Cato pithily observed , “I know of only two other countries that pursue a policy of total self-sufficiency in food: North Korea and Zimbabwe.” But people love it, from politicians , to the Crunchy Con
Dr. DiLorenzo’s article “Should Wal-Mart be Broken Up?” is a good example of how government interventions in the economy are like bacteria: you only need to start with one, and before long, you have another, and another, and another, until there are more than you can count (though there are limits on how much bacteria can reproduce themselves. I
Via Scotland: sometimes the simplest arguments for taking away freedom are the scariest : “So pervasive is poor diet that reliance on individual choice as the prime ideology in shaping food supply is no longer an adequate policy or ideology.” It’s the ultimate parent-child relationship between us and the state- “We let you have the car keys, and
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.