Romania wants to join the European Union (EU) as soon as it can because it expects membership to increase its business competitiveness and trigger economic growth. But if Romania is to reap the benefits of EU membership, policy makers need to be prepared to deal with EU bureaucracy- which threatens to undermine some of the benefits by imposing costly regulations.

Milton Friedman is dead. He left us a much brighter world than the one he found when he first started his spectacular career as a scientist, first and foremost, and as a public, unashamed, principled advocate for freedom.

I will not bore you with links and clumsy overviews of this great man’s work. You can find far better commentary on that elsewhere. I will instead share with you how this giant, who graciously offered us a welcoming shoulder, influenced my life:

My first contact with real economics came in the form of Gary S. Becker’s An Economic Approach to Human Behavior, having previously only read bland, uninspired introductory texts. Becker’s work convinced me that “there might be something about this ‘economics’ business after all”, but I was soon caught up with what I considered to be a far more worthy use of my time, the politics of individual freedom. This is where Milton Friedman came in.

Friedman showed me, in a very personal manner, that you can be a scientist, a world-renowned and respectable scientist, and still be passionate and convincing about the important things in life. Friedman showed me a way out of my political dogmatism, by convincing me that science was “with us”, not “against us”; that telling the truth was the best defense of freedom one could hope for.

Friedman brought hope and enlightenment to thousands of freedom lovers just like myself. His work single-handedly drove me to try and become the best scientist I could, something which I’m now determined, more than ever, to keep going.

His tremendous and successful efforts—both as a dedicated and innovative scientist of positive economics and as an advocate of sane, efficient, libertarian policy—will be a source of continuous inspiration.

Milton Friedman will be sorely missed. Our thoughts should now turn, I think, to Rose Friedman, his wife and life-long intellectual companion, his son David Friedman, an accomplished economists, lawyer and libertarian author in his own right, the Friedman Foundation and, not least of all, the honor of carrying on this man’s intellectual legacy.

According to economist Dominick T. Armentano, author of Antitrust: the Case for Repeal, competition law has failed in its objectives and should be repealed. The Microsft case is a classic example of competition law working against the consumer. Compete, but don’t win. Don’t make your products so attractive to consumers that 90 per cent buy from you and not from your competitors, as Microsoft does. Don’t add extra features to your products, at no extra charge, as Microsoft does. If you do, a group of bureaucrats who have never made anything in their lives can slap a 497 million euros fine on you, as the European Commission did to Microsoft in 2004.

“Supply-and-demand doesn’t apply in medicine” declared a headline in the Honolulu-Advertiser. And the soaring cost of medical care in the United States has moved pundits to call for some kind of government health insurance. In typical fashion, politicians have joined the crowd by offering solutions that increase their power rather than to examine ways that government created the problem in the first place.

Should we obey the laws of our country? A few years ago, my reply to this question was easy-going: If it pleases you to obey the laws of your country, if you believe that submitting to them makes you a better person, then please do it. Let me simply say that as far as I am concerned, obeying laws brings me no satisfaction at all. On the contrary. I find the legislation of my country and of the countries where I have resided to be arbitrary, stupid, contradictory, humiliating to those they apply to, and singularly biased in favour of those who make them.