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Our mentor has always been Hippocrates, not Adam Smith —President of a County Medical Society at an AMA meeting quoted in the February 16, 1981 issue of the New York Times . This weekend (June 11-13, 2004), the American Medical Association (AMA) will celebrate the 100th anniversary of its Council on Medical Education. The medical establishment

The economist Ludwig von Mises was once asked what one institution gives evidence that a society has crossed into socialism from capitalism or vice versa. He answered clearly and without hesitation: the presence of a stock market. Stock markets indicate a toleration for private ownership and exchange and provide the essential means to compare the

Interventionism cannot be considered as an economic system destined to stay. It is a method for the transformation of capitalism into socialism by a series of successive steps— Ludwig von Mises, “ Middle of the Road Policy Leads to Socialism ,” April 18, 1950. We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good — Hillary Rodham

In about every presidential administration for the last three decades the vile underbelly of an Executive-Branch organization spills out into the open. Right now an implosion is in progress at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that could fully expose not only its phony pretense as a protector of the public’s health but the agency as a

On June 28, 1934, Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law the National Housing Act (NHA) of 1934. Hugh Potter, president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) called it “the most fundamental legislation ever enacted affecting real estate and home ownership.” While federal intervention in housing had begun in 1932 under the

[Originally published April 2010.] One hundred years ago today, on April 16, 1910, Henry Pritchett, president of the Carnegie Foundation, put the finishing touches on the Flexner Report. No other document would have such a profound effect on American medicine, starting it on its path to destruction up to and beyond the recently passed (and

The Free Market 13, no. 11 (November 1995)   Since October 1993, we have lived through the biggest buying spree of firearms in the history of the U.S. It began just before the passage of the Brady Bill and has yet to die down. And the boom in sales will continue so long as members of the governing elites are infatuated with the prospect of gun

The Free Market 13, no. 12 (December 1995)   Halloween has a socialist tenor. Menacing figures arrive at your door uninvited, demand your property, and threaten to perform an unspecified “trick” if you don’t fork over. That’s the way the government works in a nutshell. Thanksgiving has been reinterpreted as the white man, after burning, raping,

The Free Market 14, no. 10 (October 1996)   In an episode of “Married With Children,” Jefferson Darcy tells Al Bundy that he can get fast cash by suing a mall for his stress-related injury. “Malls set aside millions for this type of thing,” says Darcy. “If we don’t get it, it’ll go to Social Security and then no one will get it!” Everyone laughs,

With premiums rising an average of 22 percent and as high as 116 percent on Obamacare’s 2017 government exchanges, it seems surreal to read journalists attributing the economic pathologies of US health care to market failure. Yet that is essentially the perspective being driven by the Associated Press and NBC with approving input from industry