Mises Daily

The gym has Fox television on, and perhaps I should be grateful, because otherwise it would not have dawned on me just how popular and widely embraced stupid is.

The government sets price its flu shot at zero and then wonders how to account for shortages. That's just the beginning of the long history of government errors concerning the flu, writes William Anderson. In the flu pandemic of 1918-1919, an estimated 500,000 Americans died of Spanish Influenza. The outbreak coincided with the last days and the immediate post-armistice days of World War I, with government actions guaranteeing that the flu would spread rapidly.

Today's neocons genuinely believe that the key to durable peace is establishing democracies throughout the world. Two problems here: first, it will require lots of warring and, second, even if achieved it will fail because peace depends on governments abandoning unlimited interventionism. As Mises said, "The tragic error of President Wilson was that he ignored this essential point."

Writes Gary Galles: 2003 was the 80th anniversary of the birth of Karl Hess, a beloved libertarian and public intellectual who was involved in most of the political debates from the 1960s until his death in 1994. His efforts on behalf of liberty were prolific, whether in over a dozen books or the life he lived in harmony with what he believed.

A common accusation against libertarianism, writes Llewellyn Rockwell, is that we are unnaturally obsessed with tracing social and economic problems to the state, and, in doing so, we oversimplify the world. If you let the people who say this keep talking, they will explain to you why the state is not all bad, that some of its actions yield positive results and, in any case, the state should not always be singled out as some sort of grave evil.

Using "backwards induction," writes Robert Murphy, economists can come up with conclusions so counterintuitive that not even the theorists entirely believe them. Instead, they put their faith in the "Nash Equilibrium" and declare the results true and irrefutable. Only one problem: the whole exercise rests on fallacy.

Laurence Vance offers a critique of John Merrifield's school voucher proposal. If the public school system were abolished, or even rendered irrelevant, what would be the point in collecting tax money from all citizens and redistributing it to those who have school-age children? How is this any different from a Great Society redistribution scheme? In short, Merrifield's "competition" and "choice" could, in practice, amount to vast wealth redistribution and another layer of educational central planning: not choice but market-based socialism.

Instead of the archetypal Austrian Business Cycle, writes Sean Corrigan, we currently have the bizarre modern phenomenon of the further discoordination caused by the wild orgy of debt-financed consumption. It has been officially promoted to keep aggregate spending and arbitrary price levels unconscionably high throughout the recession. To expect it to work is analogous to expecting that wrapping a corpse in an electric blanket to delay rigor mortis and bring about a resurrection.

The capture of Saddam unleashed so much euphoria that many people have forgotten that the original justification for the war was not merely

Network science matters because even something seemingly as simple as a price for a good emerges from the plans and actions of a multitude of individuals, writes Gene Callahan.