Earlier this month I chatted with with fellow economist Morgan Reynolds on his Reynolds Reveal .

The Lawrence W. Fertig Prize in Austrian Economics for 2013 was awarded to Laura Davidson for her paper Against Monetary Disequilibrium Theory and Fractional Reserve Free Banking. It is a rigorous and insightful paper.

The Fertig Prize is awarded to the author of a paper that best advances economic science in the Austrian tradition and includes a $1000 prize.

“[T]he clique of political hacks around Karl Rove who ran the Bush White House were so unlettered in the requisites of sound money and free market economics that, over and over, they caused the nation’s top economic jobs to be filled by statists and Keynesians.  Thus, professors Glenn Hubbard, Greg Mankiw, and Ed Lazear had no problem whatsoever advising George Bush that two giant tax cuts and two unfunded wars were entirely copacetic from a fiscal viewpoint.  After all, the huge resulting deficits provided a Keynesian pick-me-up to the prosperous classes.”

Peter Schiff makes a few calculations on Japan’s anti-deflation campaign.

“Henry Hazlitt . . . titled his March 1969 Newsweek column “The Coming Monetary Collapse.”  Hazlitt publicly warned the White House that ‘one of these days the United States will be openly forced to refuse to pay out any more of its gold at $35 an ounce.’  The result, Hazlitt insisted, would be a ‘run or crisis in the foreign exchange market’ that could end convertability entirely.  ‘If it does . . .

“[T]he stated purpose of the Wall Street bailouts — to avoid a replay of the 1930s — was drastically misguided. It was based on a phantom threat which arose overwhelmingly from the faulty scholarship of a single official . . . who had come to head the nation’s central bank. The analysis was actually not even his own, but was the borrowed theory of Professor Milton Friedman.”

Walter Block is interviewed by Louis James, the Editor of the International Speculator. Topics include Murray Rothbard, Ron Paul, Milton Friedman, the gold standard, his new book, and how to invest during this economic crisis.

The conclusion of Ohanian’s paper is quite—one is tempted to say “hardcore”—Rothbardian.

President Barack Obama is famous for many things, including two best-selling autobiographical books. In those books, he openly admitted to using illegal drugs as a young man, specifically marijuana. So, one would think that he would be amenable to reforming drug laws and sentencing guidelines, or even legalizing marijuana.