I recently had the chance to participate in an online seminar for high school debate team students. In preparing for their upcoming competition, they were interested in speaking with an economist about U.S. policy in the Middle East.

An online lecture like this was a new experience for me—a very good one. First, I’m used to college students as opposed to high school kids (that change between the ages of 14 and 18 is nothing short of amazing). Students of this age are capable of a lot, but often haven’t been exposed to the economic way of thinking. The second big change was the platform. The students could communicate with each other through a real-time chat room during the lecture. Their comments and questions about the talk were visible to their fellow classmates immediately. What was important for me was that I could also see it…while I was speaking.

Although seeing student feedback like that was a bit jarring, it was fabulous in that I could adapt and, importantly, answer their questions without ever having to hear them ask—a teacher’s dream.

In glancing up at the monitor toward the latter half of my talk, I saw that one of the students had mentioned that many of the things I was discussing weren’t current events. Indeed, I discussed with them U.S. policy going back decades.

Several months ago, I discussed how several states looked to ban or alter their A.P. U.S. History courses for teaching students ideas contrary to “American exceptionalism.” I argued that instead of assuming stupidity and gullibility on the part of our children, we should focus on teaching them critical thinking skills and help them develop the tools necessary to evaluate and critique policies on their own.

Well, here was an opportunity for me to, as they say, “put my money where my mouth is.” Here was a group of high-caliber students interested in current policy and a chance for me to make the case for why they should examine, critique, and care about historical policy.

“So why does this matter?” I asked them. “Why should we care about what U.S. policy looked like in the 1970s or the 1980s?”

I explained to them that the theory we had been discussing is really brought to life by examples. These examples are some of the best tools for making arguments about current policy options. If you want to convince your audience that what you are saying is valid and important, there is nothing quite like history.

I then told them about how during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the U.S. government took to arming the “moderate rebel group” known as the Mujahedeen. The supply of training and weapons to the group was ultimately successful, and the Soviets pulled back. Following the retreat, the U.S. government lost interest in the group and left. Who stepped in to fill the void? Osama Bin Laden.

“And that,” I said, “is how the Taliban got started.” (a-ha! It’s now contemporarily relevant!)

There is a tendency to push history to the side, to ask why it matters. History matters because it provides us a variety of indisputable opportunities to examine how policies, crises, and other events have played out over time. It forces individuals to think in a way that considers both the seen and unseen consequences of an action—to contemplate both the present and future costs of a particular activity.

Moreover, history is a phenomenal way to understand the present. Late Nobel laureate James Buchanan stated that economics “puts limits on people’s utopias.” I think the same can be said for history. History allows us to take fanciful notions and proposals and place them in check. Continuing on with the discussion of the Mujahedeen with the debate students, I then linked this historical episode to the current calls to arm “moderate” Syrian rebels. I could have told them all the reasons why such a policy might be a bad idea, but it was the historical context that made it tangible.

So whether we’re discussing the Middle East, drug prohibition, or the minimum wage, consult simple economics–and crack a history book.

Health jobs keep growing faster than other civilian, nonfarm jobs. Health care added 40,000 jobs in June, almost one in five of the 223,000 jobs added. At a seasonally adjusted growth rate of 0.27 percent, health jobs continue to grow significantly faster than other jobs, which grew at 0.14 percent (see Table I).

Although hospitals account for one-third of health jobs, they are adding workers at a significantly slower rate than outpatient care centers and home healthcare services. Nursing and residential care facilities added jobs at about the same rate.

Longer term, the story is similar. Health care added jobs at a rate of 2.91 percent in the twelve months to June, while other jobs grew 2.02 percent (see Table II). Outpatient care centers and home healthcare services have experienced sustained jobs growth at a pace greater than other health services.

I continue to believe the relative decline in the rate of growth of hospital jobs is positive, because hospitals are often the least efficient location of care and too politically powerful.

Five years ago my hometown of Tallahassee, Florida contracted with Xerox to set up 19 red light cameras at seven busy intersections in town.  The contract had the city pay Xerox about $87,000 a month to operate the cameras, and charged drivers a fine of $142 for being caught on camera running a red light.

When the program was established, city officials claimed that the cameras were installed for safety reasons, to deter drivers from running red lights, not to raise revenue.  If we take them at their word, the program worked.  Red light violations have fallen more than 90% since the program began.  The program has been so successful that the city is not taking in sufficient revenues from fining violators to pay Xerox the fees for operating them.

You can guess the ending of this story.  The city has announced that when the contract with Xerox expires in August, it will not be renewed and the red light camera program will end.  Here is a program that has been a huge success by the city’s stated criterion, so the city is terminating it.

I see two possible explanations for this.  One is that governments tend to terminate successful programs and continue the unsuccessful ones.  The other is that the city officials who originally stated that the motivation for installing the cameras was to deter red light violations, and not the revenue generated from fines, were lying.  I’m not ruling out the possibility that both explanations are correct.

In the wake of Obergefell, the outrageous U.S. Supreme Court decision finding that the traditional definition of marriage violates “due process,” Americans need to turn their attention to the dangers of overly broad state public accommodation laws. Christian business owners are especially burdened when individuals seeking to exercise a new “right” are deemed “suspect classes” and are thus entitled to heightened legal protection that appears to trump the First Amendment.

For example, Breitbart reports that Christian bakery owners in Oregon have just been hit with a gag order prohibiting them publishing any material indicating a refusal to bake cakes for same-sex weddings. Their speech is silenced contrary to the Bill of Rights.  The bakers were also ordered to pay a gay couple $135,000 for mental anguish caused by the refusal to bake the cake.  The Daily Caller has this article on the judge’s ruling.

Oregon law is a good example of the dangers to First-Amendment freedoms posed by state public accommodations laws.

Under Oregon’s statute “all persons within the jurisdiction of this state are entitled to the full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities and privileges of any place of public accommodation, without any distinction, discrimination or restriction on account of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, marital status or age if the individual is 18 years of age or older.”

The statute broadly defines a place of public accommodation as “Any place or service offering to the public accommodations, advantages, facilities or privileges whether in the nature of goods, services, lodgings, amusements, transportation or otherwise.”

These statutes, rather than promoting freedom, serve to burden Christians and  go far beyond the common law. Under the common law, the concept of public accommodation was circumscribed. The common law imposed a duty to serve all comers on businesses providing essential goods and services to travelers. This rule developed in light of circumstances where travel posed myriad dangers. A traveler denied access to an inn would be at the mercy of the elements, robbers, and hunger. Inns were havens, and usually the only available haven, where someone on a journey could obtain refreshment and shelter. Similarly, common carriers such as railroad companies usually enjoyed a monopoly on transportation services. If the carrier refused to sell a ticket to a traveler, then the wayfarer would be stranded and subject to many of the same indignities as a person denied access to the inn. Consequently, common carriers were cloaked with the public interest and were prohibited from discriminating.

The common law’s constraints on inn keepers and common carriers made sense. Travelers had nowhere else to turn for safety or passage. Hence, these few businesses cloaked with the public interest had to provide services to all. Early state and federal accommodation laws expanded the idea of the public’s interest, and specifically addressed the situation of the freedmen. In 1964, Title II of the federal Civil Rights Act did not stray far from its forerunners in the 1860s and 70s, and much like the old common law focused on businesses relating to interstate travel and restaurants.

But today under the law of many states, there is no limitation on what is a public accommodation. Every business finds itself in the position of the inn keeper of yesteryear. Moreover, the list of suspect classifications continues to expand.  While the legislators were probably well meaning in enacting these broad statutes, the Oregon ruling and its statute should cause us to rethink the wisdom of labeling every business as a public accommodation.  Actually, the First Amendment and common sense require that we do rethink these laws.

It seems like every time I log on to one of my social media accounts, someone is announcing a pregnancy or birth. Perhaps this is why I’ve recently written on the supposed “gender-wage gap” and mandated paid maternity leave.

One thing that keeps popping up among my pregnant friends is the question of whether to have a midwife deliver their baby at home or in a birth center, or seek the medical care of a doctor in a hospital when the time comes to deliver their little ones. For most of my friends, the choice is a doctor. For a few, however, the choice is midwife or bust.

My friend group appears to follow the typical statistics for birth in the United States. Of the approximately 4 million babies born annually in the U.S. (holy procreation, Batman!), about 99 percent of them take place in hospitals. The other one percent of births, however, occur outside of the hospital. While cases documented by TV shows like TLC’s “I Didn’t Know I was Pregnant” account for some of these births (yes, this is a real thing, and no, I don’t know how this happens either), many of these “more primitive” births are completely intentional. In fact, one recently launched TV show titled, “Born in the Wild,” documents women who choose to give birth to their children out in the woods.

This got me thinking. One percent of 4 million isn’t trivial—it’s still 40,000 babies annually. What’s more interesting is that this number used to be much higher—and not that long ago. In fact, Jimmy Carter was first U.S. President to be born in a hospital. In 1900, nearly all births occurred outside a hospital according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By 1970, the number of out-of-hospital births had fallen to one percent.

Yesterday marked the 214^th anniversary of Frédéric Bastiat’s birthday on June 30, 1801, in Bayonne, France. One of the seminal thinkers of the classical liberal tradition, Bastiat made great contributions to the field of political economy, laying many of the foundations for the later school of Austrian economics. Both a politician and a writer, Bastiat penned numerous books and essays on political economy and how its principles could be applied to mid-19^th century France, writing with his razor-sharp wit and renowned rhetorical flair. While his works pertain to post-Napoleonic France, they carry important lessons for our nation’s leaders, politicians, and economists.

Today, the Supreme Court in an ongoing effort to micromanage state laws and procedures reviewed whether a certain chemical cocktail used by Oklahoma in executions is constitutional. In a 5-4 decision, the Court rejected the challenge to the use of the chemical midazolam.

What is especially of interest is a dissenting opinion in which two justices (Breyer and Ginsburg) stated that they would hold that the death penalty is unconstitutional as cruel and unusual punishment prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. Never mind that the Fifth Amendment provides that “[n]o person shall be held to answer for a capital . . . crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury,” and that no person shall be “deprived of life . . . without due process of law.” In other words, the Constitution specifically contemplates a punishment—the death penalty—that two justices would hold is inherently unconstitutional.

I spent the weekend in Denver at the excellent Western Conservative Summit, where I spoke about health reform with Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner. Mr. Klein has written Overcoming Obamacare, in which he describes three schools of free-market reformers: The “reform school,” the “replace school,” and the “restart school.” (I belong to the “replace school.”) The panel was moderated by Dr. Jill Vecchio, a radiologist and Senior Fellow in Health Care Policy at the Centennial Institute.

Tragic events provide platforms for political opportunists—remember we can’t let a good crisis go to waste—and the mass shooting of African Americans by a white racist at a Charleston, S.C., church has created a plethora of opportunities. The one on my radar screen today is New York film critic Lou Lumenick’s argument for banning the Academy Award–winning film Gone with the Wind. It’s a great reminder of why we don’t want film critics in charge of social policy.

Lumenick notes, accurately, that the film, based “on a best seller by die-hard Southerner Margaret Mitchell, ‘Gone with the Wind’ buys heavily into the idea that the Civil War was a noble lost cause and casts Yankees and Yankee sympathizers as the villains, both during the war and during Reconstruction.” Lumenick also says that the movie, and the Confederate flag, represents slavery and a defense of slavery.

Among the friends of liberty, there is much confusion about whether the Supreme Court’s Obergefell opinion is a vindication of liberty or an usurpation of power.  When thinking about the opinion we should be aware of two different modes of analysis:  policymaker and judge.  How we see Obergefell depends on which mode we have switched on.  Let me explain.

I was an undergraduate when I first encountered the case of Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 405 (1905). Lochner dealt with a New York statute prohibiting bakers from working more than 60 hours per week and/or 10 hours per day. The state argued that the statute was a simple exercise of the police power—the reserved power to pass general legislation for the health, safety, and welfare of the people. The Supreme Court, however, held that the statute deprived bakers of liberty without due process of law contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment. Asserting that bakers were not “wards of the state,” the Court found “no reasonable ground for interfering with the liberty of person or the right of free contract by determining the hours of labor, in the occupation of baker.”