Category Archives: Required Reading

Moved by a post on Crazy Glue

I must say, this is probably the first time I’ve been moved by a post on Crazy Glue, but when it’s from a Cuban blogger and a metaphor for what Cuban life is like, well, read for yourself.

So I will leave this post here, and go and buy my share of crazy glue, my necessary dose of that instantaneous mender. Perhaps a few drops will help me to gather the pieces of that future we’ve dropped on the floor, smashing it to smithereens all over the place.

As I’ve posted before, there’s a reason the flow of people is North.

Link via Carpe Diem


A Must Read

Please take a few minutes to read this fantastic essay by Barton Hinkle “Where Do Our Obligations Come From?

Link via Cafe Hayek


It’s really about getting other people to buy you stuff

Carpe Diem points out the cost of insurance for a young person in Michigan.

It points out what’s been clear to thinking people all along:  Passing health care reform was always about using force to make one group of people buy something for another group of people.

If you choose between health insurance and a cell phone (much less an iPhone), that’s your doing.  Not mine.  I should not have to subsidize your cell phone, or your vacation… which is what these folks really want.

But no one would ever pass a law making me pay for cell phones or vacations.  Health care, on the other hand, well not paying for that is just mean.


One Way

All the traffic is coming North.

There’s no secret why.


De Coster on Lemonade

This is a fantastic piece by Karen De Coster.

To replace commerce with government planning carried out by a small class of people who think they know what is best for the rest of us is brute force against our person and property.

Read it.  And put her blog in your RSS reader.


This is the war on drugs

Take a gander at this post at Reason, and watch the video.

Happy with that?


May Day Remembrance

Every May 1st, I link to Catallarchy and their May Day Remembrance post; this year is no exception.

Take a minute today to think about all the people killed in the name of collectivism, socialism, and communism.


8 Macroeconomic fallacies

Economics was my Money and Banking textbook in 1989.  I thought it was all correct until I read Mises and Hayek in grad school.  This essay by Robert Higgs (pdf) highlights 8 key fallacies in Macroeconomic thinking, all of which politicians and pundits continue to repeat.

H/T Cafe Hayek


A great letter to the President

From Don Boudreaux

But further pondering of your point leads me to look beyond such nit-picking to see fascinating possibilities.  Not only insurers, but all producers who greedily refuse to supply persons who don’t pay should be set aright.  Now I’m sure that you don’t ration the supply of the books you write according to any criteria as sordid as requiring people actually to pay for them.  But our society is full of people less enlightened than you.

For example, the typical worker rations his labor services according to who pays and who doesn’t.  That must stop.  Oh, and supermarkets!  Every single one rations groceries according to who pays.  Likewise with restaurants, clothing stores, home-builders, furniture makers, even lawyers!  You name it, rationing is done according to who pays.

Awesome. I doubt He will respond.


To those who want to give the government more power and control

I suggest you read this.

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

Horrifying.  Ought to be enough, but probably isn’t.

Via Radley Balko


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