The hottest commentary of the year appeared in the Wall Street Journal: Why Chinese Mothers are Superior by Amy Chua. The story has 7,200 comments and counting, and every other outlet including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, and everyone else, including tens of thousands of bloggers. The author’s name yields more than one million google hits.
I went through airport security in Memphis a few hours ago. This is the first time I’ve flown in a few months. I opted out of the backscatter imaging machine and into the full-body “pat”down. I put “pat” in quotes because this wasn’t a patdown. It was an extremely thorough rubdown. An observation and a question:
1. I can see how this experience would bring back horrifying memories for someone who has been sexually abused. This involved a lot more than just incidental contact.
The former Tunisian police force belonging to President Zine ElAbidine Ben Ali were thugs who enforced the dictator’s rule. They engaged in bullying, intimidation, bribery, and numerous human rights abuses, including contributing to the deaths of more than 100 government protestors in the last couple of months. On Saturday, they too took place in protests, alongside those they used to assault.
The quotes below come from these various news outlets.
Most people never have occasion to navigate the “intellectual-property” thicket so they might be susceptible to arguments like one I recently heard. I was asking permission to use a certain text for a final printed publication. The rights holder knew of my own views on these matters — I see copyright as government coercion — and so he couched his preliminary position in the form of argument that I’m summarizing here:
Any theory — including any of Paul Krugman’s Keynesian models — that neglects the distortion of the capital structure during boom periods cannot possibly hope to accurately prescribe policy solutions after a crash.
As part of the Mises Academy’s continuing efforts to provide ever higher quality service to students, in Robert Murphy’s Anatomy of the Fed class, in addition to the live lectures, we are trying out providing separately-recorded, higher video-quality versions of each lecture.
It looks like the state of Ohio is going to “privatize” the development functions of its Department of Development. Gone will be the bureaucracy that is the state, to be replaced by something else. But what is the right name for this something else, this new beast?
Fifty years ago, Rothbard saw the need for institutions to support scholarship, writing, publishing, and the exchange of ideas in the libertarian tradition. Otherwise, young people will turn to political activism and find themselves drifting left and right rather than staying on the path toward liberty.
