Police justify killings like that of Freddy Gray’s on the grounds that such aggressive tactics are necessary to protect lives and property. But when widespread destruction of property, and threats to life and limb appear, the police are breathtakingly inefficient.
NBC reports that the Pope has denounced the so-called wage gap:
“Why is it taken for granted that women must earn less than men? No! They have the same rights. The discrepancy is a pure scandal,” he told tens of thousands of people at his general audience in St. Peter’s Square.
In A Short History of Man, I try to explain three of the most momentous events in the history of mankind.
First, I explain the origin of private property, and in particular of ground land, and of the family and the family household as the institutional foundations of agriculture and agrarian life that began some 11,000 years ago, with the Neolithic Revolution in the Fertile Crescent of the Near-East, and that has since — until well through the late nineteenth century — come to shape and leave an imprint on human life everywhere.
A good chunk of the debate over inequality today centers around what Milton Friedman identified as “the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.” This fallacy is one that any student of economics is familiar with, but the layman may not be: the fixed pie fallacy. The fixed pie fallacy is synonymous with the zero-sum fallacy in economics: that anyone’s benefit comes at someone else’s expense. In other words, if one person earns a dollar, someone else is worse off by a dollar.
Mises Daily Wednesday by Mark Thornton:
Measuring aggregate prices through a consumer price index is inherently arbitrary because someone decides what to measure and how. There are better ways to do it, but “fixing” the measure will do nothing to fix the ills of the Fed’s monetary policy.
In this lengthy interview, Walter Block talks to the Brazilian libertarian group “Liberball” about a wide variety of topics from revisionist history to business regulation to Murray Rothbard.
On April 15, Walter Block joined host Phil Pepin (at 28:00) to discuss anarchism and the international system of states. [Mp3 download.]
Mark Thornton also joined Pepin on April 1 (at 2:00) to discuss his article “Transparency or Deception: What the Fed Was Saying in 2007.” [Mp3 download.]
