Healthcare in the United States is Pandora’s Box: even the mere thought of it releases physical and emotional curses upon policymakers.
As we witnessed during the 2020 election season, and as we are sure to witness during the upcoming holiday season, the United States Postal Service doesn’t exactly instill confidence.
If businesses get government subsidies to make their products cheaper, or “capture” regulation to hurt their competitors, that’s rent seeking.
Competition is often considered a dirty word, with many critics of free market ideas emphasizing the cutthroat competition of Wall Street as an example of how competition brings out the worst in people, encourages us to cut corners, and undermines our altruistic tendencies.
Organized interest groups are able to control a lot of policy making, even if most people in the unorganized public disagree with them.
The wary cat has a theory of the world: “Stove burns you. Stay away from stove.”
We need to be careful about arguing that players have a First Amendment right to protest peacefully on the field.
President Trump has repeatedly claimed that the United States is the highest-taxed country in the world. The data people are using to fact-check him are misleading.
The government has been ruining US health care since 1946.
We treat those we believe to be ill-motivated as adversaries to be defeated, and we frequently have no compunction about excluding them from our “disinterested pursuit of truth.”
For any kind of libertarian/classical liberal, the question with foreign policy is which course of action is going to most maximize liberty, both in the country that is potentially doing the intervening and the part of the world where the intervention might take place.
Without government interference in my insurance plan, where would I be today?
It is an easy mistake to think that restrictions on international trade that help one industry “grow and prosper” will help all industries “grow and prosper.”
When we experience a large decrease in supply, or an increase in scarcity, the price mechanism helps us know what to do next.
Prices are the moral rationing agents of market exchange.
Professor Ilya Somin recently joined us on Reddit for an “Ask Me Anything” conversation as part of our Learn Liberty Reddit AMA Series. He answered your questions about Game of Thrones, voter ignorance, and the prospects for bipartisan reforms in the direction of liberty. Fans of Learn Liberty will recognize Professor Somin as the star of our popular video, I Can’t Breathe: […]
The next time someone starts explaining to you how government regulation is needed because corporations have the special privilege of limited liability, please channel Count Rugen.
In partly free societies, more intergenerational mobility isn’t always a good thing.
The media rarely celebrate ordinary people doing jobs for which they get paid. But the man selling several generators can be more impactful than the man giving one away.
Given that Africa has the world’s youngest population, the lack of steady, formal-sector jobs is an enormous political and economic risk factor. Unemployed youth are more likely to be criminals, may be lured into militant groups, and contribute to political unrest.
People sometimes ask me, “What is the most important concept in political economy?” The answer is easy, but subtle …
Whenever a politician claims to be pro-business, stop to look at what they actually mean by it. The approach makes all the difference.
It is a bedrock American principle that governments cannot discriminate against religious citizens and institutions.
The current controversy over the removal of Confederate monuments from public spaces is producing a great deal of rancor and strife.
Why did poverty decrease so much over the past 200 years, and especially over the past 30 years? Let’s look at one key example; then we’ll zoom out to the broader research.
Ilya Somin is Professor of Law at George Mason University. His research focuses on constitutional law, property law, and the study of popular political participation.
Many of the most expensive flood and storm disasters in US history have occurred in recent decades. The glib response is to blame the severity of these catastrophes on climate change, but are we looking in the wrong direction?
President Donald Trump claimed Senators who voted against Obamacare’s replacement, the AHCA, had “let down Americans.”