Normally, I wouldn’t bother examining an article like this, but the author of the piece tries to score some points using Walter Block and the Austrian School as examples, so I’ve commented. My remarks in brackets:
ANALYSIS: Are free-market Catholics ignoring Pope Francis?
Two items of note:
Contrary to Milton Friedman’s dogmatic ruminations about “positive economics,” the Coase Theorem was accepted by the entire University of Chicago economics department based on Friedman’s acceptance of it after a dinner party at his home with Coase and members of the department. This is according to Coase himself. There was no “testable hypothesis” in “The Problem of Social Cost,” and no ”empirical testing” of any kind. Friedman announced the idea to be acceptable, and so it was, without question, by the Chica
by Jacob Huebert
Murray Rothbard, the great libertarian theorist and economist, hated Goodfellas. He especially hated the depiction of gangsters as “psychotic punks” whose violence was “random, gratuitous, pointless.”
He preferred the Godfather films, where the gangsters never engaged in violence “for the Hell of it, or for random kicks,” but only used it to enforce contracts the government police and courts wouldn’t uphold.
[To complement Robert Murphy’s post today on economics and education:]
From Human Action XXXVIII: by Ludwig von Mises
In his The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, John M. Keynes criticized, without citing or mentioning him explicitly, Hayek’s (Austrian) primary policy recommendation: the best way to avoid a bust is prevention.
To complement George Reisman’s article yesterday:
Fast-food workers across the county have recently held a number of high profile protests to agitate for higher wages. These protests have been accompanied by efforts to increase the wages mandated by state and local minimum wage laws, as well as a renewed push in some states and localities to pass “living wage” laws. President Obama has proposed raising the federal minimum wage to ten dollars an hour.
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
As 2013 draws to a close, let’s pause to recall some important developments for the cause of liberty – some of which you already know well, and others you’ll be hearing about for the first time.
Edward Snowden. After sitting on the Bush-era warrantless wiretapping story for 18 months, the New York Times revealed a portion of the surveillance activities of the US government in 2005. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we now know that the National Security Agency’s spying activities vastly exceeded anything we heard about in the media.
