The New York City mayor has decreed the Nissan NV200 minivan will become the official taxi of the city. In addition to illustrating the corrupting effects of political power, the episode underscores the economic problems of government ownership of roads.
A situation in which abundant unused reserves of all kinds of resources (including all intermediate products) exist may occasionally prevail in the depths of a depression. But it is certainly not a normal position on which a theory claiming general applicability could be based.
I just came across some interesting information about what is sometimes referred to as “the first copyright” dispute (h/t Kevin Glick). It concerns one of Ireland’s three patron saints, St. Colum Cille (521-597 AD) (the others being St. Patrick and St. Brigid). Colum Cille was given this name when he became a monk–the name meaning “Dove of the Church”. He is sometimes he is referred to as Colmcille or Columba, which is the Latin for Dove.
It is obvious to advocates of liberty that modern communications and technology–cell phones, twitter, texting, video, youtube, email, and the Internet–are crucially important in the fight to delegitimze, expose, and fight against the state. Of course the state always works to hijack and corrupt various institutions and aspects of life in order to increase its control and power.
In a recent screed masquerading as the thoughts of a Nobel prize winner in economics, Paul Krugman excoriates those who speak of
fear: fear of a debt crisis, of runaway inflation, of a disastrous plunge in the dollar. Scare stories are very much on politicians’ minds.
As Krugman explains, such worries are irrational and certainly untrue:
