City Council in London, Ontario recently decided to explore their options for regulating “short-term rentals” arranged through companies such as Airbnb, HomeAway, etc.

It has been widely, vividly, but nonetheless wrongly believed that socialism is the appropriate system to improve the living standards of Africans. Worse yet, it has been misleadingly claimed that socialism is compatible with African culture because African culture is fundamentally a collectivist culture. However, one fact remains undisputable: socialism has failed wherever it was tried, and the African countries that have experimented with socialism were not exempted from its failure.

At his entertaining blog, John Cochrane has a good thought experiment showing the flaws with conventional measures of income inequality. However, after making his great point, Cochrane summarizes by writing:

In 1945, the great English author and medieval scholar, C.S. Lewis, penned an incisive essay in The Spectator called “ After Priggery—What? ” that discussed the dissolution of priggery as a prominent vice in British society. The absence of priggery is in itself no bad thing, but Lewis warns that the vacuum created by the absence of priggery cannot be sustained. In the absence of a replacement virtue, another vice shall come to fill the void.

On the latest episode of Part Of The Problem, Dave Smith continues his Wednesday One-on-One interview series with Jeff Deist. Jeff and Dave discuss D.C. as “Hollywood for ugly people,” Ancapistan (and how that would work in a real world setting), the future of religion in western society, and how the Fed may be responsible for lower birthrates.

In December 2012, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe set out three arrows in his quiver to pull the country out of the more than 20 years lasting stagnation. Immense purchases of assets by the Bank of Japan, huge government spending programs and structural reforms should deliver a sustained recovery to the Japanese people. In the meantime, it is becoming evident that so-called Abenomics is – despite buoyant stock prices – a damp squib.

An article published this month by Chad Bown and Douglas Irwin (the latter one of the more consistent and effective defenders of free trade in academia) provides a rather disappointing view of the free trade ideal in scholarly circles. Their discussion highlights the confusion (or perhaps hypocrisy) that surrounds such debates at present.