Ryan McMaken provides a sweeping roundup of false perceptions of the American West. The story is not one of unrelenting violence but of hard work, trade, peace, and the tedium of daily life. The development of the West was not dependent on the soldier with the rifle, but on the blacksmith, the school teacher, and the saloon owner.
The Chinese "yellow peril" was the late nineteenth century menace. And today, write Cecil Bohanon and T.N. Van Cott, the menace is outsourcing. The Chinese and Indians are selling Americans things like computer software at bargain basement prices. But there is nothing special about outsourcing software technology. All that matters is whether the Chinese and Indians sell for less than what current American software producers could earn in their next most lucrative employment. If so, outsourcing enhances U.S. living standards.
The Center for Responsible Lending says that payday lending is a predatory business in that it lures borrowers into a "debt trap." Mike Foley says this view is all wrong: pay-day lending provides liquidity when it is most needed, and an an opportunity to establish a positive credit history.
All libertarians—indeed, all reasonable people—can agree that the state licensure of floral designers is absurd, and anyone but the most naïve will recognize an exam to become one as nothing but a state-enforced cartel. But, writes Robert Murphy, unless we realize that all government regulations are violations of liberty, which represent nothing but a dishonest means of gouging consumers, piecemeal lawsuits will never bring justice.
What are the costs of a mission to Mars? The $11 billion direct expenses are only the beginning, write Erich Mattei. The burdens also include taxation and inflation, the crowding out caused by state-sponsored research and development, the misallocation of physical and labor resources, the draining away of talent from the private sector, pollution, and many other hidden costs.
An unfortunate consequence of learning Bastiat's "Broken Window Fallacy," writes Jude Blanchette, is the accompanying frustration of seeing this age old economic fallacy reappear ad nauseam. One of the latest, and indeed most vocal rock throwers, is the United States manufacturing sector.
Jim Bovard is, without a doubt, the best political researcher-writer in politics today, say Karen De Coster. While most writers add a few footnotes to their writing, Bovard adds some first-rate writing to his immaculate set of footnotes. He doesn't make wild judgments or blanket allegations. Instead, he provides an encyclopedia’s worth of timely quotes laid out in chronological fashion, to funnel the reader through an extensive framework of US government double-dealing, coercion, corruption, and propaganda milling.
Like the children of Lake Wobegon, writes Robert Blumen, many investors in the 1990s believed that stock market returns would always be above average. They were proven wrong. But Greenspan and many others advance a slightly different justification for the bubble: the efficient markets hypothesis, which argues that the current price, whatever it is and even when pump up by credit expansion, is the best of all possible worlds.
The destruction of the gold dollar and the socialization of credit risk go together with the history of war. Warfare, whether victorious or not, retards the accumulation of productive and livable capital.
