[Transcript of a lecture recorded in 1965]
 

There would be no need to work for liberty were liberties not being lost. Most Americans are unaware of a decline in individual liberty, and the reason is obvious: the decline rarely takes the form of sudden personal deprivations but, instead, takes the form of unnoticed erosion, and thus we come, as do the Russians, to regard whatever state we are in as a normal condition.

Times are tough for the chicken business the Wall Street Journal reports. Pilgrim’s Pride will shut down another of the company’s chicken-processing plants in an effort to survive a vicious price squeeze in the poultry business. “Our industry’s business model is not sustainable at these [price] levels,” said Pilgrim’s Pride Chief Executive Bill Lovette on a conference call. The company will have 29 bird-processing plants after the Dallas plant closes.

[Excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (1995). An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Jeff Riggenbach, is available for download.]

Gregory Page of Cargill thinks government hoarding bears some responsibility.

This put a smile on my face today. CNN reports that according to the latest statement from the U.S. Treasury, the government had an operating cash balance Wednesday of $73.8 billion. This puts it in second place to Apple Computer’s healthy stash of $76.2 billion in cash and marketable securities.