p> A European court has ruled that people can be fined and prosecuted in criminal court for saying things about religious figures. Specifically, saying things about the Muslim prophet Mohammad is verboten, and state punishment is appropriate:
The European Court of Human Rights has ruled a woman convicted by an Austrian court of calling the Prophet Mohammed a paedophile did not have her freedom of speech rights infringed.
While one often hears a lot of talk about the virtues of “mom and pop” shops (and the evils of “big box” stores) policy makers do remarkably little to encourage the growth and health of small businesses. While the federal government has created a federal boondoggle ostensibly designed to favor small business — known as the Small Business Administration — only a tiny number of businesses ever benefit from anything the agency does.
Subjective value is not objective. Sounds obvious, but the distinction is lost on most — scholars and practitioners alike.
People seem to think subjective value is simply a person’s ‘willingness to pay’ a price. Well, it’s not. Subjective value cannot be expressed in dollars and cents, because that would simply mean subjective value is an expression in terms of objective market purchasing power.
Let’s talk about Econ 101, scientism and modern economics.
At Bloomberg, Noah Smith argues that Greg Mankiw’s Principles of Economics textbook is out of date because academic economists are more concerned with empirics and wealth inequality.
As with the federal investigation into college basketball recruiting, the college admissions scandal announced yesterday seems to fall into FBI jurisdiction only because of the overly broad mail and wire fraud statutes and federal racketeering laws — which make every tort or contract violation into a federal crime.
[This originally appeared in Libertarian Review in November 1978.]
Libertarians surely favor freedom of speech, that is, the right to speak without being hampered by the government. But the right to speak implies the right not to speak, the right to remain silent. Yet libertarians have themselves been strangely silent on the many instances of compulsory speech in our society.
We are closing in on the third anniversary of the UK’s referendum to exit the European Union. The decision by the British people on June 23, 2016, was overdramatically called by many as revolutionary, but it was significant without a doubt. In theory, Britain is set to leave the EU in a little more than two weeks — on March 29. Nonetheless, there might not have been a time since the vote in 2016 that Brexit actually happening was so much in doubt as today.
