The philosophical and legal foundation of the U.S. government (and some other governments) is that government officials are the agents of the citizens—in the familiar phrase, those who govern have the “consent of the governed.” An agent, of course, is someone I authorize to act on my behalf. For a host of reasons, this doctrine has always been more or less absurd, but its absurdity has been placed in stark relief recently by the government’s mass spying, which violates the Constitution, various statutes, and many official declarations and promises.

While E.J. Dionne was certainly wrong about many things in his article from February 9, I wouldn’t go so far to call it a smear job or a screed. Indeed, Dionne, in his book Why Americans Hate Politics, mentions the tactics and thought of Murray Rothbard on more than one occasion, and gives him a somewhat evenhanded treatment.

In his post a few days ago entitled “Don’t Ask George to Dance,” Bob Murphy referred to George Selgin’s “pugnacity” in denying that he is an Austrian. Now neither George’s pugnacity, nor his quintillionth public profession of his non-Austrianism, is sufficiently interesting to warrant comment. What does deserve comment, however, is George’s less than ingenuous explanation of why he is not an Austrian. George writes:

Mark Thornton refutes the recent ‘Washington Post’ attack on Austrian Economics. Thornton is a Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute

Dr. Mark Thornton, John O’Donnell and Merlin Rothfeld take a look at the current market situation (January 24th) and offer suggestions as to where we may be headed going forward. The trio also take a look at the gloomy unemployment scene in the US, and solutions to getting jobs back in America.

President Obama described his fellow Democrat, who just announced his retirement after four decades in Congress, as “one of the most accomplished legislators of his or any era.” The Washington Post’s Harold Meyerson calls him a ” legislative genius” who “decisively consigned the Republican right’s favored ideology—libertarianism—to history’s dustbin.” He did so, Meyerson went on, by proposing “common sense” laws. “Who could be against “ Waxman?

by Dominick Armentano [LewRockwell.com, February 12, 2014]

[Editor’s Note: Contrary to myth, Austrians are not opposed to quantitative or empirical assessments of history in light of economic knowledge. The confusion may arise from the fact that Mises regarded this not as economics, strictly speaking, but as economic history, or the work of historians. Nonetheless, discussions of measurements of economic phenomena are often informative. In this article, Julian Adorney examines some Keynesian methods of measuring the economy.]

Lew Rockwell writes:

Today would have been Burt’s 85th birthday. What  a great businessman, what a great libertarian, what a great person. And read his very funny book.