The TSA's False Tradeoff - Robert P. Murphy - Mises Daily

The TSA's False Tradeoff - Robert P. Murphy - Mises Daily: "In fact, no matter what procedures are implemented, it's always possible that wily terrorists will still manage to beat the system. In real life, we can never guarantee safety. This is why so many pundits' discussions of airline travel miss the mark completely: they assume that there is some objective answer of 'the right' amount of security, when this is a complex economic question."

"Only in a truly free market — where different airlines are free to try different approaches to safety — could we approach a sensible solution to these difficult questions. Passengers who don't mind invasive scanning or sensitive inspections could patronize airlines offering these (cheap) techniques — assuming they were really necessary to achieve adequate safety. On the other hand, passengers who objected to these techniques could pay higher ticket prices in order to fly on airlines that hired teams of bomb-sniffing dogs, or set up very secure prescreening procedures (perhaps with retinal IDing in order to board a flight), or implemented some as-yet-undreamt-of method to keep their flights safe, without resorting to methods that their customers found humiliating."

"One possibility is that the legal system would hold airlines strictly accountable for such property damage, and that the airlines would need to purchase massive insurance policies before obtaining permission to send giant steel containers full of jet fuel hurtling over skyscrapers and shopping malls."

End the IMF - Henry Hazlitt - Mises Daily

End the IMF - Henry Hazlitt - Mises Daily: "If there were no IMF, governments whose currencies were shaky as a result of their reckless fiscal and monetary policies would be forced to go to private bankers or investors to extricate them, and private investors would insist on guarantees of fiscal and monetary discipline as a condition of such help. But Keynes insured that a nation's 'domestic' inflationary policies 'shall be immune from criticism by the Fund.' He provided for automatic borrowing rights, and left any aid conditions to the necessarily political decisions of other governments through their representatives on the IMF."

A Tale of Two Colonies - Gary Galles - Mises Daily

A Tale of Two Colonies - Gary Galles - Mises Daily: "The change from communal- to private-property rights dramatically increased the Pilgrims' productivity. The beginnings of that productivity led to the bounty celebrated at Plymouth's famous 1623 Thanksgiving. And as historian Russell Kirk reported, 'never again were the Pilgrims short of food.'"