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Why are diamonds, which are little more than decorative baubles, so much more valuable than water, without which we would die? The answer is that value is determined at the margin, meaning that we value not “diamonds” as a category compared to “water” as a category, but one more diamond compared to one more unit of water. Water is super-abundant

I continue to be struck by the relevance of Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson even though it was published over sixty years ago. The Mises Institute’s new edition , with an introduction by Walter Block, will make Hazlitt’s insights accessible to a new generation of students and readers. We have made much progress during the decades since

The Huntsville Times reported on September 12 that, in response to the looming threat from Hurricane Ike, Alabama Governor Bob Riley declared a formal state of emergency. The governor’s declaration of emergency activated the state’s price-gouging law, which makes “unconscionable pricing” illegal during times of emergency. The Times quoted Riley as

Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Gustav, and Ike are gone but their legacies will live on. We can learn from disasters and disaster recovery: natural disasters are “teachable moments” because they show how well-intentioned government interventions and even private aid can have unintended negative consequences. Shortages, complaints of “price gouging,”

Paul Samuelson, one of the most famous and influential economists of the 20th century, was once asked to name an idea in economic theory that was both true and nontrivial. After several years, he responded that the law of comparative advantage fits the bill, saying that its logical truth “need not be argued before a mathematician” and arguing that

The Securities and Exchange Commission took the very drastic step of outlawing the essential financial practice of short selling in an attempt to galvanize financial markets. (The SEC recently extended at least some portions of its initial ban through October 17.) But short selling provides essential information to market participants and helps us

Should “Joe the Plumber” be allowed to do plumbing work without all the requisite licenses and affiliations? What if he were calling himself an interior designer? A recent article in Regulation magazine discusses how many states are passing regulations on interior design. I recently read Francis Schaeffer’s compelling A Christian Manifesto , and

My son is almost three months old, so suffice it to say that my wife and I have spent a lot of time thinking about, purchasing, changing, and disposing of diapers. I was reassured when I read that, according to a British government study, the carbon footprint attributable to disposable diapers is markedly lower than the carbon footprint

Low wages in developing countries are among the many sins allegedly committed by global capitalism, but few of those making the charge really stop to think about why wages are so low in some developing countries. In his 2007 book The Myth of the Rational Voter , economist Bryan Caplan proposes an interesting thought experiment which suggests that

If environmental stewardship obligates us to be mindful of future generations in making our day-to-day decisions, what should we do? Should we be recycling paper and preventing people from building parking lots to save trees? Or should we acknowledge that the planet will be destroyed sooner or later and try to find ways to build something like