Edward Chancellor in The Financial Times (requires free registration) after a few paragraphs on the perversities of the current international monetary system, asks “What’s to be done?”. Replying:

He was a good friend of Ludwig von Mises’s and also the Mises Insitute, so I hope you can understand this rather unconventional posting. Here is the Dies Irae from the Requiem Mass that all of Europe is talking about.

Requiem in c-moll
Missa pro defuncto Archiepiscopo Sigismondo
Michael Haydn (1737 — 1806)
Domchor & Domorchester St. Stephan
Hans Haselböck, Orgel
Leitung: Domkapellmeister Markus Landerer
Sopran: Tünde Szabóki
Alt: Alice Rath
Tenor: Gernot Heinrich
Bass: Günter Haumer
Orgel beim Requiem: Anne Marie Dragosits

I had every intention of blogging my way through FreedomFest in Las Vegas this week, where the Mises Institute had a strong and conspicuous presence, but I ended up spending so much time running to sessions and visiting with folks at the book table that the blogging didn’t happen. Sometimes there’s so much to write that one hardly knows where to begin.

One could detect two general types of sessions this year, and I was struck by the rather wide chasm that separated them.

In a recent interview for Bloomberg Businessweek, Alan Greenspan was asked about his role in the creation of the 2008 financial crisis.

[The Transformation of the American Economy, 1865—1914: An Essay in Interpretation • by Robert Higgs • John Wiley & Sons, 1971]
 

When it comes to deflation, even Austrian economists disagree.

If the free market does in fact move toward full employment, the entire Keynesian “general theory” falls apart.

In response to my recent article, “Was the Space Shuttle Worth It,” I received an interesting e-mail from George S. Giles, who’s written several times for LewRockwell.com, including this on NASA aspirations toward Mars. With his permission, I’m posting parts of it here, edited somewhat for clarity and length.

Like his mentor Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek spent his academic career trying to expose the central planner’s pretense of economic knowledge. In doing so, Hayek referred to “the knowledge problem.” In explaining it, he writes,