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The Obama administration announced last week that it is delaying a key portion of the implementation of Obamacare — meaning the financial penalties to small businesses that fail to comply. The dominant news meme seems to be that we should not under any circumstances assume there is any problem with the Affordable Care Act (ACA), that these types

Earlier this year, the distinguished Harvard biologist, E.O. Wilson wrote of the limitations of mathematics in the sciences in the Wall Street Journal . This native son of Mobile, Alabama — better known elsewhere as the Father of Sociobiology — argued that the ability to formulate conceptual contributions to science does not stipulate mathematical

It’s an old story. A manufacturing plant in a small town announces an impending closing, threatening to devastate the local economy and the many families that depend on it. Panic ensues, and politicians intervene. There’s a sense of injustice in the air. Can anything be done? Although this scenario played itself out many dozens of times in the

The Democratic Party gained prominence in the first half of the nineteenth century as being the party that opposed the Second Bank of the United States. In the process, it tapped into an anti-state sentiment that proved so strong that we wouldn’t see another like it until the next century. Its adversaries were Whig politicians who defended the

My clothes dryer went bust the day after Christmas, leading to one of the more common frustrations we face in the modern nation-state. You see, there was a time when one’s dryer broke, the owner faced two options: have it repaired or buy a new one. The owner would weigh the costs and benefits of each, make a decision, and then move on to other

“Bernanke Enjoys the ‘Fruits of the Free Market,’” or so we’re told in a Reuters headline from March 4 about the former Fed chairman’s 40-minute speech in Abu Dhabi for which he received, ahem, $250,000. In the Reuters author’s defense, he was only quoting a DC lobbyist who was defending the amount, and added, Bernanke “will personally experience

“E-Cig Execs Are Actually Thrilled With New FDA Regulations” was the lead story last morning on Time magazine’s website about the Food and Drug Administration’s proposed rules banning the sale of electronic cigarettes to minors, their sale in vending machines, and (of course) extending those ridiculous and ignored warning labels we now see on

One of my favorite economists in the history of economic thought is the great Austrian, Carl Menger (1840–1921). While the mainstream of the economics profession acknowledges Menger’s place due to his contribution to the Marginalist Revolution in the 1870s, it otherwise ignores him because his theoretical framework does not lend itself to policy

Taking a page from the excellent Robert Higgs , James K. Galbraith surveys the banking industry and wonders why the bailout is necessary. He writes (“A Bailout We Don’t Need”): Just look at interest rates. Last week, in the panic, the federal government could fund itself, short term, for free. It could have raised money for 30 years and paid less

From Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization comes this description of the Ukrainian approach to soccer: More than almost any other county in the world, the Ukrainians have an idiosyncratic approach to the game. The man behind the approach was a coach, trained as a plumber, called Valeri Lobanovsky.