My article How Intellectual Property Hampers the Free Market, just appeared in the latest Freeman (June 2011; pdf).

Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe burst onto the Austrolibertarian scene in the late 1980s, when he moved to the United States to study under and work with his mentor Murray Rothbard. Since his arrival, Professor Hoppe has produced a steady stream of pioneering contributions to economic and libertarian theory. A key contribution of Professor Hoppe is his provocative “argumentation-ethics” defense of libertarian rights.

In setting the stage, Hoppe first observes that the standard natural-rights argument is lacking:

Government is a gang of thieves writ large. Let’s look at the reality.

[Excerpted from chapter 4 in part 1 of the The Turgot Collection (2011). Originally written in 1757.]

[Introduction to The Turgot Collection: Writings, Speeches, and Letters of Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune (2011)]

Lots of great Fed propaganda posters here, from yesteryear

Here is an interesting article in the New York Times about the subsidized bike rental system in Paris (HT to Briggs Armstrong).

Many of the specially designed bikes, which, when the system’s startup and maintenance expenses are included, cost $3,500 each, are showing up on black markets in Eastern Europe and northern Africa. Many others are being spirited away for urban joy rides, then ditched by roadsides, their wheels bent and tires stripped.

Turns out there is a second minimum wage — a minimum wage for the disabled (currently, the minimum is effectively zero). And for supposedly moral reasons (reckoned in the absence of the morality of labor itself), some so-called advocates for the disabled are tirelessly working to price them out of the labor market.