The Goal Is Freedom: A Matter of Priorities

'Tis the political season, which means the season to bash immigrants. This goes especially
for so-called
illegal aliens, i.e., residents without government papers. (As if that's a
big deal.) Candidates and others who are so set on securing the Mexican border — the Canadian border
seems of less concern — and expelling those
who had the audacity to come to the land of the free without permission mainly rely on
two arguments: jobs and welfare. If those are the best arguments they've got,
they haven't got much. More . . .

A NEW article by Sheldon Richman

Medical Competition Works for Patients

Health-care costs overall have been rising faster than inflation, but not all medical costs are skyrocketing. In a few pockets of medicine, costs are down while quality is up. Dr. Brian Bonanni has an unusual medical practice. His office is open Saturdays. He e-mails his patients and gives them his cell-phone number. “I need to [...]

The Medicalization of Everyday Life

In my October column I discussed the concept of medicalization and its role in modern societies. In this column I propose to answer the question: How are we to understand the contemporary confusion about what counts as a disease? Medical classification—the linguistic-conceptual ordering of phenomena we call “diseases” and of the interventions we call “treatments”—is [...]

In Praise of an Uncommon Woman

Popular literature is full of praises for “the common man,” but I am much more impressed by the men and women who stand apart from the crowd. Some wise observer once said that only three kinds of people exist in the world: a very few who make things happen, a somewhat larger number who watch [...]

The Fear of Free Trade

It’s hard to think of an issue that is more polarized than the one between free traders and protectionists. Those of us who favor free trade believe in the ethical principle that people should be free to buy from whomever they choose, and in the economic truth that wealth and efficiency increase as prices fall. [...]

Casualties of the War on Poverty

Newspapers around the world recently carried a news item that seems to be a damning indictment of the U.S. government and the American people. The 2005 U.S. Census indicates that the percentage of poor Americans living in “severe” poverty was at a 32-year high.  This put the proportion of poor people in deep poverty at [...]

Book Reviews – December 2007

• Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World
  
  by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu Reviewed by Andrew P. Morriss
  
• Econospinning: How to Read Between the Lines When the Media Manipulate the Numbers
  by Gene Epstein Reviewed by Joseph Coletti
  
• The Entrepreneurial Imperative: How Americas Economic Miracle Will Reshape the World (and Change Your Life)
  by Carl J. Schramm Reviewed by Frederic Sautet
• The Green Wave: Environmentalism and Its Consequences
  by Bonner Cohen Reviewed by George C. Leef
  

Uneven Information Causes Market Failure?

In a famous 1970 paper, economics Nobel Laureate George Akerlof used the market for used cars to show how differences in information between buyers and sellers (“asymmetric information”) could lead a market to shrink or collapse entirely. A large variety of markets have been said to fail because of asymmetric information, from all different types [...]