Steve Horwitz links to this list of “60 Things NOT To Do if You Hate the Free Market,” assembled by libertarian students at St. Lawrence University. I think it is a nice response to inane and condescending “look at all these idiots using government roads to get to their anti-tax, anti-government protests” pictures and comments.

Comedian Adam Carolla breaks down the current occupy Wall Street movement in very frank terms (NSFW language). He dives into the cultural reasons that lead us into this situation.

See also Helmut Schoeck’s Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour.

And, this is what the tragedy of the commons looks like.

The new film Margin Call is a tale of a Lehman-like collapse and a Goldman Sachs-like crony return that is the first to even try to explain the Austrian Business Cycle Theory in a major studio film even though they do miss the cause of these fluctuations that is the Federal Reserve, central banks, and the the fiat currencies that cause these bubbles, panics, booms, manias, and busts.

While Tea Partiers have been venting their spleens about the $700 billion in TARP money that congress threw at the banks in order to keep the modern financial system from collapsing, Bloomberg went to court to obtain documents to shed light on how much dough the Federal Reserve really provided the banks during the 2008 meltdown.

With every passing day I believe more and more that status-seeking drives a lot of human action. Contrary to popular wisdom, I think this is weighs in favor of free markets rather than against them. A complete discussion requires a lot more space than I have here, but I don’t think status-seeking based arguments against free markets stand up to to closer inspection.

This year, I tried (and failed) to give up on spectator sports. The opportunity cost of watching baseball and football is just too high, I thought. It worked until about September or October. Over the summer, I checked occasionally to see how the St. Louis Cardinals were doing–I grew up rooting for them, and I went to grad school in St. Louis from 2001-2006–and I thought it was fairly clear that I wasn’t missing anything. Then the Cardinals went on a historic tear that culminated in a World Series victory.

As the discussion of the UC-Davis Pepper Spraying incident has proceeded, one of the best things I’ve seen circulating is this quote from the first few lines of Frederic Bastiat’s classic “The Law:”