Those who are in the news for pilfering the shuttle debris that rained down on Texas and Louisiana earlier are getting a bad rap, writes Christopher Westley. While the government can retrieve shuttle remains on public lands in any way it sees fit, it cannot violate the rights of property owners simply because they were unfortunate enough to wake up one morning and find government property on their land.
Nationwide, rose prices are often double on Valentine's Day from what they are on most other days of the year. Why are rose prices so high on Valentine's Day? And while we answer the question, let's be careful to keep cause and effect straight.
The classical economists were opponents of paper money. And yet in their positive case for commodity money, they made two great errors: believing that an additional supply of notes on the market confers some social benefit and believing that money's value needs to be stable in order to meet the needs of trade. These errors inadvertantly paved the way for political intervention.
Sympathy and justice are wonderful. But neither is furthered by the "living wage" movement, writes John Egger. A university shouldn't put its workers on its own welfare system. To respect their dignity we must pay them what they earn, and that can be established only on the market.
The accusations against Wal-Mart are many, and they include: paying overseas workers too little; not paying benefits to part-time workers; refusing to sell items that don't fall within its criteria for being "family-oriented"; not giving enough back to the community; and discriminating against women. Karen De Coster and Brad Edmonds respond.
The idea that commerce and war are allies is a complete perversion of the old liberal tradition. The first theorists of commerce from the 16th through the 18th centuries saw that a most meritorious aspect of commerce is its link to freedom and peace, that commerce made it possible for people to co-operate rather than fight. It made armaments and war less necessary, not more.
Do you remember, asks Tibor Machan, when America was called the leader of the Free World? It seems like so long ago. Now the USA is the leader of the protectionist world, the very opposite of free, at least where international commerce is concerned.
To speak about average prices is like talking about average precipitation to a golfer, writes Chris Mayer. It either rains during a specific time period or it doesn't. There is no average that is anyway useful for an acting human being on a golf course. The only information that counts is what it is doing right now while he is teeing off. It is the same with prices.
In a market society, any distinction of classes only serves to represent some snapshot in time as movement between classes is continually fluctuating, writes Christopher Coyne. This is in stark contrast to the non-market caste system where affiliation with a class or caste is hereditary and largely unchanging.
No one can contend that the Federal Reserve System has brought economic stability or conquered the trade cycle, writes Hans Sennholz. On the contrary, its critics are convinced that a politically conceived and administered money monopoly, such as the Federal Reserve System, is the worst of all money systems. It will breed business cycles as long as it lives.
