Property Insurance for Costal Residents: Governments’ “Ill Wind”
James R. Rinehart, Jeffrey J. Pompe

Federally and state subsidized flood and wind insurance have encouraged overbuilding in coastal zones, thereby worsening the economic destructiveness of hurricanes and severe storms. Governments should stop subsidizing activity in hazardous areas and instead allow the market for coastal property insurance to encourage individuals to exercise greater caution by building sturdier buildings and moving farther from the coast.

The Life and Works of Ludwig von Mises
Richard M. Ebeling

Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) produced path-breaking critiques of socialism, central banking, and methodological malpractice in the social sciences, yet the details of his intellectual development had remained a mystery. Fortunately, in the monumental biography Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism (2007), Jörg Guido Hülsmann reveals many of these details, illuminating the remarkable life and works of a man who deserves wider recognition for reviving classical liberalism and putting it on a more consistent footing.

Sovereign Impunity
Charlotte Twight

Members of all three branches of the federal government now act with near impunity in stretching the Constitution to suit their political objectives and personal preferences. This development is illustrated by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act; reauthorization of the USA PATRIOT Act; the alternative minimum tax; the REAL ID Act; presidential signing statements; warrantless domestic electronic surveillance; the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America; and Supreme Court decisions on eminent domain, the commerce clause, and the First Amendment.

Resource Exhaustibility: A Myth Refuted by Entrepreneurial Capital Maintenance
John Brätland

Claims that oil deposits and other extractive resources are “exhaustible” often conflate physical exhaustion (total depletion of the physical stock of a resource) with economic exhaustion (loss of the expected profitability required to induce resource owners to continue extracting and marketing the resource). Yet that distinction is crucial, because when private-property rights are unencumbered, entrepreneurs usually have several strategies available for maintaining the economic value of their firms while they continue to operate them.