A Brooklyn bagel shop owner was assessed $1, 650 in fines by a New York City Health Inspector because–get ready for this–poppy and sesame seeds fall to the floor as he makes his bagels. Alex Gormakh, the owner and a recent immigrant from Russia, opened B & B Empire Bagel Cafe in June 2011.
If we want want laborers and employers to come together to discover and create value-productive jobs, then the prescription is simple: leave labor markets alone and let them churn.
[This article is excerpted from volume 2, chapter 10 of An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995). An MP3 audio file of this chapter, narrated by Jeff Riggenbach, is available for download.]
[Written Testimony before the Subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology Committee on Financial Services, US House of Representatives, May 8, 2012]
Not to worry 99 percenters, Ben Bernanke’s Fed policy of just-north-of-zero interest rates is starting to gain traction. Sure, unemployment is still elevated, and the number of people on food stamps still enormous, but the news is out that the collateral loan obligation (CLO) market is starting to come alive.
[What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets • By Michael J. Sandel • Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012 • 244 pages]
Michael Sandel, a popular government professor at Harvard, asks a good question, but his answer leaves a great deal to be desired. Are there things, he wants to know, that should not be bought and sold on the free market?
[Testimony before US House Committee on Financial Services Domestic Monetary Policy and Technology Subcommittee, May 8, 2012]
At a hearing (going on NOW) of the House Financial Services Committee on the Federal Reserve, Ron Paul is dealing with Lacy Clay who in the past called Austrian Economics “unscientific” because it was deductive, a Keynesian Democratic congressman (Keith Ellison) who wants the Fed to inflate more to focus on the “employment” side of the dual mandate, a Friedmanite Republican congressman (Kevin Brady) who wants a “single mandate” of “price stability” (posing, of course, as a free market a
