If hedge funds can be regulated or inhibited from selling short, asks Christopher Mayer, what is next? Ban mutual funds that invest in tobacco companies or other sin stocks? Ban investors from betting against a rise in the dollar? Prohibit investors from owning gold? (That's already been done before.)
It is natural that liberty and peace go together, writes Lew Rockwell. Liberty makes it possible for people from different religious traditions and cultural backgrounds to find common ground. Commerce is the great mechanism that permits cooperation amidst radical diversity. It is also the basis for the working out of the brotherhood of man. Trade is the key to peace. It allows us to think and act both locally and globally.
Thomas Woods recently wrote on LRC, "It still frustrates me that some people who really believe themselves to be conservatives are so enthusiastic about the impending war with Iraq." We've all encountered this in our private lives, people with whom we have agreed with on a huge range of economic and cultural issues are just downright wrong on the war.
Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said last Thursday, during questioning by the Senate's special committee on aging, that he does not believe that a housing price bubble exists on a national level in the United States. "Is Greenspan right?" asks Frank Shostak. To provide an answer to this question one needs to establish—or define—exactly what a bubble is.
Almost exactly ten years ago, a National Commission on Social Security Reform headed by Greenspan proposed a package of benefit cuts and tax increases, which Congress enacted with little change, and which turned out to be one of the most oppressive—and underhanded—things Congress ever did to younger Americans over Social Security. It also failed to solve Social Security's long-term problems.
No other currency, national or international, can conceivably take the place of the American dollar. They all suffer seriously from the same ideological malady: they are the creation of political concern and authority. Whatever we may think of gold, it always looms in the background, beckoning to be used as money, as it has been since the dawn of civilization.
Those who speak of "commodification," which apparently has become a buzzword in socialist circles, actually have things backwards. The presence of a price upon a good does not make it scarce; rather, it is the scarcity that creates the price. To put it another way, the very nature of scarcity means that a good must be rationed, as it cannot be given freely to everyone who wants it.
Numbers never lie. Or do they? With government, it's simply a matter of who's keeping the books. Take America's so-called war on drugs, for instance. Last year, Congress earmarked nearly $19 billion—nearly twice what it spent on military operations in Afghanistan—to enforce U.S. drug laws.
What can one say about this system with its huge problems, whose defenders now say it should be granted a 33% fare (tax) increase? The fare, after a series of perfunctory public hearings that most people will not attend because they are too busy trying to earn a living to pay New York's huge tax bill, will be hiked from $1.50 to $2.
The United States faces a situation that resembles the late 1970s when the world began to abandon the dollar and liquidate American investments, writes Hans Sennholz. It took two years of Federal Reserve inactivity and 20 percent interest rates to restore foreign confidence and lure foreigner investors and creditors back.
