I was interested to read in the Financial Times, "Iceland weighs plan to peg krona to another currency":Iceland’s finance minister has admitted it is untenable for the country to maintain its own freely floating currency....Benedikt Johannesson told the Financial Times that the Nordic island of...

The “skinny” budget proposed by the White House a few weeks ago will undergo significant changes as it wends its way through the maze of congressional committees, but it’s clear that the president and his economic advisers really do want to take a scalpel to programs that are marked by waste, fraud and abuse.

In a comment on my co-blogger Alberto Mingardi's post on the FDA, AlanG writes: FDA has to evaluate new drugs based on their risk/benefit profile. Large clinical trials of new vaccines destined to be administered to healthy children are required to really understand what risks might be present. Would you want this any other way?

My thesis is as follows: Gains from exchange contain the seeds of their own expansion. When economists and other intellectuals provide evidence that deregulation increases gains from exchange, either these intellectuals, bureaucrats, or others often draw on this evidence to seek deregulation. They don't always succeed, but they do sometimes, and one success can lead to others.