Here are some extra sources and readings from my talk:

Thomas E. Woods, Jr. (visit his website) is the author of 11 books, including two New York Times bestsellers: Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse and The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History.

In my living memory, every socialist failure has been blamed on the weather. And so it is with the pathetic job growth figures in the U.S., which the New York Times attributes to “snowstorms.” Never mind the minimum wage, the payroll tax, the regulations, the mandated benefits, the dozens of agencies that add artificial costs and risks to the hiring process, the unions, and the vast governmental machinery that inhibits start ups. It’s really all the fault of mother nature.

Examples of a variant of what Mises termed the ultimate given regularly catch my attention.

According to Mises, “Scientific research sooner or later, but inevitably, encounters something ultimately given that it cannot trace back to something else of which it would appear as the regular or necessary derivative.”

As I note in my post “The” Purpose of Patent Law, it is commonly said that “the” purpose of patent law is to incentivize innovation.

The employees of the TSA can now be unionized. Public sector unions are a remarkable survivor of day’s of old, which is interesting since the theory of unions is that workers need organized protection against private capital. It happens, however, that unions are most successfully organized from among those living off the taxpayer, and least successful among those workforces that are subject to market discipline.

Wendy McElroy is the author of XXX: A Woman’s Right to Pornography (St.