So Senator Harry Reid, D-Nevada, thinks that the privately-funded United States Olympic Committee “should be ashamed” for providing its teams with uniforms made in China and that the uniforms should be “burned.” Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Representative Steve Israel, both Democrats from New York, quickly weighed in on the controversy with a joint letter to the USOC expressing their displeasure.
The saying that things may work nicely in theory, but do not necessarily work in practice is well known.1 It is typically meant to disparage the importance of theory, suggesting it would be too far removed from practical matters to help in solving the issue at hand.
Jason Sorens has posted a very thoughtful review of Ralph Raico’s outstanding recent book, Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School.
“There are two types of ethically invalid land titles: “feudalism,” in which there is continuing aggression by titleholders of land against peasants engaged in transforming the soil; and land-engrossing, where arbitrary claims to virgin land are used to keep first-transformers out of that land. We may call both of these aggressions “land monopoly”—not in the sense that some one person or group owns all the land in society, but in the sense that arbitrary privileges to land ownership are asserted in both cases, clashing with the libertarian rule of non-own
Anticapitalists like to use examples of supposedly selfless gift exchanges in “primitive” societies to contrast with the greedy behavior of modern markets. But a closer look at one famous exotic gift exchange, the Trobriand Islanders’ Kula, actually reinforces libertarians’ claims about the universal power of the profit motive.
Over the years George Selgin has dished out quite a bit of abuse in various and sundry blog posts to Murray Rothbard and those who hold that fractional reserve banking is inherently unstable and cycle-generating. I must concede Selgin is enormously entertaining in his balls-out, over-the-top ferocity in defense of something that he lately has been calling “monetary freedom.” Danny Sanchez noted Selgin’s most recent rant in his blog yesterday.
