Tweet [1]
Richard Epstein lays the lumber to Obamacare [2]. Here’s his opening sentence:
On Friday, May 10, President Obama ventured into Ohio to give a Mother’s Day defense [3] of the sagging fortunes of his signal achievement, the misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The law, the President assures us, “is here to stay”—a comment that is best regarded as a threat and not a promise.
Mark Perry appropriately praises an unsung major technology advance: the shipping container [4]. Also, one of the commenters to Mark’s post appropriately mentioned Mark Levinson’s excellent book of a few years ago on this topic – a book entitled The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger [5].) And fortunately – after a half-century or so of very little improvement – the shipping container looks to be on the verge of making a substantial leap forward in efficiency, versatility, and reliability [6]. If so, the world will become even smaller and the world economy even bigger. In a world more economically informed and less prone to worshiping as saviors allegedly Great Men or Great Women, Malcom McLean [7] and the other individuals who played a large role in making the shipping container a reality would be, with far more frequency than are politicians and military generals, celebrated with boulevards bearing their names, currencies (privately issued, of course!) bearing their likenesses, and anthems singing their praises.
Rob Bradley explains why Hayek understood economics better than does T. Boone Pickens [8]. (Back in 2008 I wrote on a similar matter [9], but with less eloquence than Rob.)
Here’s Jonah Goldberg on the current I.R.S. scandal [10].
Over at Libertarianism.org, George Smith is up to part 5 of his series on defending the non-aggression principle. Here’s part one [11] (with links to the subsequent parts easily found). (HT Walter Grinder)
I’m eager to read Alvaro Vargas Llosa’s Global Crossings [12].