"Sustainability" is the doomsters' rallying cry. The slogan is clever. It sparks apocalyptic urgency. But clever slogans and vivid imagery are no substitute for clear thinking about the place of private property in environmental concerns.
It's a neat trick, writes Adam Young: the media sell a certain viewpoint, then take a poll and cite public opinion to illustrate that, yes indeed, the public agrees with what it has been told, and that the only solution is more government intervention.
The statement given by the Bush administration to Congress and now available online, entitled "The National Security Strategy of the United States," must be read to be believed, writes Joseph Stromberg. Its historical points are dubious, its economics misleading, and its social theory a heap of dangerous half- or third-truths.
Facing a looming recession, the Federal Reserve resolutely lowered its discount rate and frantically expanded its credits. Eager to stimulate the sagging economy, it enabled and encouraged businessmen to invest more and consumers to go ever deeper into debt. Yet the specter of recession refuses to fade away. What is the Fed to do?
What is essential for us today is to continue the research, the writing, the advocacy for sound money, for a dollar that is as good as gold, for a monetary system that is separate from the state. It is a beautiful vision indeed, writes Lew Rockwell, one in which the people and not the government and its connected interest groups maintain control of their money and its safe keeping.
In point of fact, terms like "dove" and "hawk" have little substantive meaning when applied to the Federal Reserve. Robert McTeer's unrelenting inflationism is considered dovish, while Laurence Mayer is labeled a complete hawk on TheStreet.com's Fed Scorecard, despite the fact that he has yet to cast a dissenting vote!
What we see in Japan has nothing to do with the mythical liquidity trap, writes Frank Shostak, and everything to do with an explosion in debt, a reckless monetary policy, and tight government controls of businesses via the ministry of trade and industry. To put it bluntly, the Japanese have been depriving themselves of real funding in return for American government promises to repay the debt.
It is never profitable--and therefore, never reasonable--for a business to refuse to do business that is profitable for it to do, writes George Reisman. To pretend that businessmen and their greed are nonetheless responsible for people not being supplied, and for people therefore suffering deprivation and even death, is to display an ignorance of elementary economic law.
Those who think ethics is bogus, and there are literally thousands of them in universities and colleges across the globe, seem unwilling to apply moral ambiguity where it actually does apply. For example, why are capitalist institutions so often subjected to blanket moral condemnation?
Modern Americans live lives considerably less simple than that of Henry David Thoreau on Walden Pond. But Thoreau's insights in "Civil Disobedience," writes Gary Galles, are more important in our far more complex world.
