May 07
Every government program designed to help poor people get health care produces the opposite effect: Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare all subsidize artificial demand, causing prices to rise. If government withdrew its evil tentacles from health care, medical prices would quickly adjust downward and quality would quickly adjust upward. Markets always win. Now the New York …
Apr 29
Lysander Spooner University will put on an exciting 1-hour course on Friday, May 20, 2016 at 6:30 p.m.: Energy Storage Innovation!! The course will be taught by a local Montana mystery man: “Right On John.” See his Facebook page here. Right on John purports to be from Canada. He has invented and designed a wide …
Apr 03
Government bureaucrats frequently spot good ideas being implemented in the private sector, and then try to show they are doing something by mandating that the private sector must do what it is already doing. The intrusive mind of the tyrant never pauses. Consider the trucking industry, which is filled with business owners and operators who …
Apr 02
For years, trusters of government have promoted ‘green’ energy schemes by which the government subsidizes so-called alternative energy technology. The goal, supposedly, is to build up solar, wind and other alternative-energy industries, until they can compete with (and ultimately displace) fossil fuels. It never works. Solar and wind sources cannot stand on their own against …
Jan 22
There seems to be a religious hatred among government trusters against fossil-fuel suppliers. A loathing almost as irrational as the unshakeable, almost hypersexual, love of self-styled “conservatives” for men in government uniforms. Even as petroleum products have been made cheaper and cheaper by private sector innovators, the government of California is poised to forcibly take …
Dec 08
Fascinating psychological research from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology suggests that male brains are better at judging directions than female brains. See here. The research involved MRI scans of brain activity.
Nov 13
On a per-mile basis, the automobile is the safest form of land transportation ever invented. See here. It is often said that planes are safer than cars; but on a per-trip or per-hour basis, cars are even safer than planes. Yet governments, for a century, have burdened car travel with reams of unnecessary rules and …
Oct 21
(Pictured above: visionary and futurist Julian Simon) After a century of needless regulation, and hundreds of thousands if not millions of violent arrests of drivers for traffic violations, the era of driverless cars is upon us. Dozens of private firms, including Tesla, Apple, Google, GM, Honda and many others, are already producing driverless-car prototypes which …
Oct 05
The U.S. Postal Service lost $5.5 billion in 2014 and has lost many more billions over the past decade. Even as global trade, communications and shipping has skyrocketed, the Postal Service can’t operate efficiently. U.S. Postal workers are greatly overpaid. Hundreds, even thousands, apply for every opening. It might be said that the PRIMARY purpose …
Sep 27
A case study in how the government-supporting media report business news through the lens of government. This weekend, dozens of prominent newspapers (including the Bozeman Daily Chronicle) reprinted an Associated Press (AP) story entitled “Side Effects: Lack of regulation, competition, research costs increase prescription drug costs in the U.S.” See the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s republication …
