[Our Enemy, the State (1935)]
 

In the era of franchised unisex stylers like Supercuts and Great Clips it’s hard to imagine that barbers and cosmetologists are fighting over who can have a barber pole advertising their shops. The latest legislative fights over the swirling red, white, and blue poles are in the states of Minnesota, Michigan and North Carolina.

The New York Times reports of more financial woes for municipalities. Suffolk County will run $530 million into the red over the next three years and has declared a financial emergency. The New York state oversight board already seized financial control of Suffolk’s Long Island neighbor, Nassau County.

Danny Hakim writes,

Robert Wenzel would like to see more Rothbardian history.

He seems to me entirely right; it’s imperative that those who knew Murray set down their stories about him.  Here is one of mine to start things off. Murray had an incredible memory for historical  detail. One I was telling him that I had manged to stump Mel Bradford by asking him Rutherford Hayes’ middle name. Murray said, “It was Birchard, of course.”

Despite hysterical warnings about the grave evils of deflation from central bankers, mainstream economists, and financial pundits, we are reminded on a daily basis of the Austrian insight that falling prices are a boon to consumers and a manifestation of growing economic prosperity. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, a secular decline in overall prices is a benign and natural outcome of a dynamic and growing capitalist economy operating under a genuine gold standard.  Unlike central bank fiat money, a commodity-money

Much of my recent work deals with the theory and practice of entrepreneurship, and I have often referred to an “entrepreneurship research bubble,” characterized by a huge increase in research funding, faculty positions, courses, centers, degree programs, books, articles, etc. Indeed, the academic field of entrepreneurship has exploded in the last decade (see pp. 23-24 of the new book for some stats).

The Circle Bastiat, which flourished from 1953-1959, was a group of Murray Rothbard’s closest friends and disciples. Ralph Raico and George Reisman, while still in high school, began to attend Ludwig von Mises’s famous seminar at New York University. There they met Murray Rothbard, then working on his doctoral dissertation at Columbia, who had been an active member of the seminar for several years.