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BoC Warns Against the Obvious
Last Thursday the Bank of Canada warned against the obvious: condos are overpriced and this poses a risk to the whole economy. The BoC singled out the Toronto market, noting that the country’s largest...
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For Want of A ($20,000) Nail
Now that the housing market in the U.S. is beginning to recover from the crisis which began nearly six long years ago, people are finally becoming interested in building and buying new homes again. The...
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The Unemployed Generation
Recent reports indicate that the employment situation for young people in Canada is even more dire than that of the general population. A study by CIBC found that 420,000 aged 15 to 24 are neither...
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The Lesson of Sarah Murnaghan
The story of 10-year-old Sarah Murnaghan is something out of feel-good television drama. Here was a young girl fighting for her life as her parents made a desperate plea for public sympathy. Murnaghan...
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How Our Right To Travel Became a Bureaucratic Ordeal
Reprinted from Reason.com Last week, my vacationing family was stopped at not one, but two, internal checkpoints along Interstate 8 in Arizona and California and questioned about our citizenship. I...
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Hayek (1945) on Why Network News Is Losing Control
Reprinted from GaryNorth.com In 1945, economist F. A. Hayek wrote what turned out to be a classic paper on how decentralized knowledge is made available to the public by means of the free market. He...
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Alberta’s Preloaded Debit Cards
If there has been one thing worse than the damage caused by the flooding in Southern Alberta, it is the government’s response. Ronald Reagan had it right when he said, “The nine most terrifying words...
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Cuba Moving Toward Liberty?
“The Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.” - Fidel Castro, 2010 The word on the street is that the Cuban government will soon begin deregulating state-run companies in 2014. In a recent report...
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Getting What’s Deserved
Finally some good news. Given the size and influence of government in our lives, I have become accustomed to dismaying reports followed by own cynical rationalization. Sometimes that’s all you can do...
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How to Regulate the Market
Someone named Omar brought up a very good point in comments section on my last post. Here’s the question: “If a planned economy through the control of the money supply and interest rates results in an...
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Surveillance Has Changed Us
Reprinted from Laissez Faire Today My passport is festooned with patriotic blather about freedom and democracy. It didn’t used to be this way. The less freedom we have, the more government has to...
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Poloz’s First BoC Interest Rate Statement
Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz said that interest rates will remain low and the economy will grow due to “accommodative financial conditions.” His logic goes: The US economy is recovering ergo...
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A Plea for Public Property
Reprinted from FreeNation.org Public or Private? Libertarians often assume that a free society will be one in which all (or nearly all) property is private. I have previously expressed my dissent from...
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The Rationale for Total Privatization
Reprinted from Mises.org [Libertarian Papers (2011)] I have three goals. First, I want to clarify the nature and function of private property. Second, I want to clarify the distinction between “common”...
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Alleviating Separation Anxiety (Part 2)
…all human interaction, without exception, should be based on voluntary agreement. No one should be forced to associate with anyone else against his will. – Dr. Walter Block, Secession, 2007. In a...
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How the Internet Saved Civilization
Reprinted from Laissez Faire Today I’ve just completed a heavy schedule of talks at the Agora Financial Investment Symposium in Vancouver. All my talks centered on information economics, Web startups,...
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No Censorship for Wikipedia
Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, is no fan of censorship. So when the Chinese government asked him to comply with new regulations that require online identities to be linked with real names,...
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The Criminality of the State
Reprinted from Mises.org As well as I can judge, the general attitude of Americans who are at all interested in foreign affairs is one of astonishment, coupled with distaste, displeasure, or horror,...
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The Age of Hyperbole: How Normal Weather Became ‘Extreme’
Reprinted from PJ Media Said Thomas Jefferson: “The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” Jefferson’s comment may be expanded to include most...
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Sow it Everywhere
Reprinted from LewRockwell.com Review of Martin A. Lee, Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana—Medical, Recreational, and Scientific (Scribner, 2012), vii + 519 pgs., hardcover. Although I don’t...
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