Listen here.

Opponents of (more) government control of health care and health insurance are breathing a sigh of relief after Tuesday’s upset senatorial election in Massachusetts. But now that the celebrations are subsiding, I feel compelled to warn that the most perilous days may lie ahead.

Read TGIF here.

Richard W. Fulmer

for his essay, “Legends of the Fall: The Real and Imagined Sources of Our Bubble Economy.”

Richard Fulmer is a senior fellow with the Institute for Energy Research and coauthor (with Robert L. Bradley, Jr.) of Energy: The Master Resource.

The prize is $2,000 and publication in The Freeman.

Congratulations, Richard!

It’s one of the responses to an essay by Douglas Rasmussen, “Why Ayn Rand: Answers and Some Questions for Discussion.”

Those who cherish liberty cannot calculate their debt to Murray Rothbard.

Read TGIF here.

This month marks the 15th anniversary of the death of Murray Rothbard, arguably the most important libertarian theorist of the twentieth century.  Although I only met him once in person, his work was influential in developing my “calling” in a number of ways, and the way he approached his scholarly and activist work for libertarianism over his life provides a number of lessons for advancing our own callings and the freedom movement more broadly.

Read Steven Horwitz’s column here.

Every time the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) fails to protect aviation, as it did when it allowed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board a plane Christmas Day, it punishes passengers with further restrictions and humiliations. Now the agency wants to virtually strip-search us with whole-body imagers.

Becky Akers’s full column is here.

Total employment peaked in 2007 at 137.6 million persons on nonfarm payrolls, fell slightly in 2008, and then dropped precipitously in 2009 to 132.0 persons, for a two-year loss of 5.6 million jobs. In 2009, total employment was approximately equal to its magnitude in 2001, even though the labor force had grown substantially in the interim. The sharp recent decline in employment, which normally increases from year to year along with the labor force, has been bad enough, but when we examine the components of aggregate employment, we discover even worse news.

We find that the loss of employment has occurred entirely in the private sector: employment fell from 115.4 million persons in 2007 to 109.5 million persons in 2009, a decline that took private employment back to its level at the end of the 1990s. As private employment has collapsed since 2007, however, the government payroll has actually grown slightly from 22.2 million persons in 2007 to 22.5 million persons in 2009, which puts this class of employment roughly 1.7 million persons above its magnitude in 2000. [Emphasis added.]

Read the full article here.

So the alleged government “stimulus” has been a bomb. For example, it was supposed to revive the construction industry and create jobs. But…

[T]the AP looked at … [t]he more than 700 counties that got the most stimulus money per capita for road construction, and the more than 700 counties that received no money at all….

There was no difference in unemployment trends between the group of counties that received the most stimulus money and the group that received none, the analysis found.

Full article is here.

How many truly private-sector jobs were not created because government hogged the capital?

HT: Chris Coyne

The phrase “transparent government” is just this side of a logical contradiction. A really transparent government would barely qualify as a government at all. Imagine if you could witness all the backroom dealing, logrolling, outright bribery, and the rest of the shenanigans that go on under the laughable rubric “governing.” It wouldn’t last a week.

Read TGIF here.