New York has just joined the national popular vote (NPV) compact. In the name of democracy, it would pledge each adopting state’s electoral votes to whoever received the largest national vote, if enough other states do the same. It brings adopters to 165 out of 270 state electoral votes necessary to impose their agreement.

Recently, a reporter for the Ottawa Citizen wrote a completely fabricated and incoherent paper on soils, cancer treatment, and Mars. Its full title? “Acidity and aridity: Soil inorganic carbon storage exhibits complex relationship with low-pH soils and myeloablation followed by autologous PBSC infusion.”

The Review of Austrian Economics, Vol. 2, Number. 1

From the 2014 AERC: At the Authors’ Forum this year, Mark Thornton discussed the origins and scope of The Bastiat Reader a new collection of Bastiat’s writings to become widely available later this year. Full audio here. 

See also The Bastiat Collection.

A recent study from Princeton and Northwestern concluded that the United States is an “oligarchy” ruled by a small group of wealthy elites and interest groups.

According to authors Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page:

In the last few years, there has been a big emphasis in entrepreneurship on “lean” startups. Being lean basically means avoiding unnecessary costs early in the development of a new venture, thus minimizing waste and reducing the negative effects of uncertainty. For example, a common lean strategy involves using consumers to test a limited run of an unfinished product in order to furnish data before going to market.

It is worth recalling that Congress during the first Clinton administration passed legislation limiting cash compensation for CEO’s of public companies to $1 million. The result was that compensation swung to stock options. This in turn encouraged CEO’s to borrow in order to buy in company stock, which helped stoke the subsequent stock market bubble.

From Jeff Deist: