[This article is excerpted from Back on the Road to Serfdom: The Resurgence of Statism (2011). An MP3 audio file of this article, narrated by Steven Ng, is available for download.]

While the real world has switched from defined benefit pension plans to defined contribution plans (e.g. IRAs, 401k), much of government still uses defined benefit plans where retirees receive regular pension checks based on a formula. The problem today is that many public systems are underfunded and are having difficulties remaining viable. The economic crisis is a culprit in that there are fewer people working and contributing, but more importantly the assets of the plans, such as bonds, are earning less. This is the money that is used to pay retirees.

Leonard Read’s classic “I, Pencil” is a staple of introductory economics classes the world over. I expect that the same will happen with the TED talk below, in which Thomas Thwaites details how he tried to make a toaster completely from scratch. He makes a valiant effort. At the end, he is able to get something he can plug in that ran for about five seconds before the heating element melted. I’m pretty sure he didn’t actually get any toast.

In 1998 Paul Krugman declared “It’s Baaack” in a silly article heralding the return of the Keynesian liquidity trap, a chimera that even Keynes himself never believed in. But recently something very real and truly dreadful has climbed out of the witch’s brew of fiscal and monetary stimulus policies concocted by Ben Bernanke and other mainstream economists and policymakers who have drunk the same Kool-Aid as Krugman.

Four years after housing prices peaked the number of foreclosures climbed over one million last year. Despite the federal government intervening with the HAMP (Home Affordable Modification Program ) program and the foreclosure moratorium caused by the Robo-Signing scandal RealtyTrac reports that 2.9 million foreclosures were filed in 2010.

The American Economic Association recently held their annual conference in Denver. David Warsh reports that members were working on a variety of thorny issues, like what caused the economic crisis, how to prevent future crises, and even what to name the current crisis. No solutions are yet available. On a promising note, he reports that there appeared to be some interest in reviving the study of the history of economic thought.

I’ve disagreed before with J. Neil Schulman on IP issues — see Kinsella v. Schulman on Logorights and IP. Here’s an edited version of a query I put to him on Facebook this morning:

Neil, in your Logorights article, you say (if you’ll forgive me copying your pattern):

Back in 2006, Objectivist Greg Perkins wrote a defense of IP entitled Don’t Steal This Article!: On the Libertarian Critique of Intellectual Property.