It's not as if socialism is a new idea. It was tried in the 20th century. It produced economic stagnation and despair. In its purest form, it extinguished more than one hundred million people.

Socialized medicine must fail for the same reasons all socialism must fail: it offers no system for rationally allocating resources, and instead promotes the overutilization of all resources, ending in bankruptcy.

Profit is a signal that valuable services are being rendered to people on a voluntary basis.

American money was never more sound, or banking more free, than 200 years ago. Since then, it's been a long steady decline from the gold standard and competitive banking to our Fed-run system of inflated paper currency, deposit insurance, and perpetually shaky banks on the dole.

Now, it is sometimes said that medical care is too important to be left to the market, and that it is immoral to profit from the illnesses of others. I say medical care is too important to be left to the failed central plans of the political class. And as for profiting from providing medical care, we can never be reminded enough that in a free society, a profit is a signal that valuable services are being rendered to people on a voluntary basis.

Let every nation, right now, do what is best for all citizens of the world: eliminate every form of intervention that would prevent or otherwise hobble mutually beneficial trade between any two parties anywhere in the world. No bureaucracy can help us toward that goal; it must come from a growing realization of the merit of freedom itself.

One ironic legacy of the Clinton administration is the rearming of the American citizenry. Each time Clinton and his friends in Congress threaten another round of anti-gun regulations, the American people respond by stocking up.