Yes, the facts and figures are a click away. The ability to use, understand, and communicate those facts is what must be taught and currently is not. And it doesn’t take an army of 8 million and a budget of 1 trillion dollars and counting to do it.

The case of Seuss enthusiast Charles Cohen beautifully illustrates the harmony between personal profit and service to others in the voluntary market economy. For good or ill, entrepreneurs will provide what the customers want — whether it’s one fish, two fish, red fish, or blue fish.

Ever since the current depression began, the Fed and most Washington politicians have assured us that quantitative easing, low interest rates and stimulus spending would all combine to set the state for real estate to “lead us out of the recession.” As far as I can tell, this theory is based on the idea that if real estate values can be re-inflated, then people will buy more houses, more furniture and more stuff.

There is considerable evidence that the entire concept of “social Darwinism” as we know it today was virtually invented by Richard Hofstadter. It certainly didn’t apply to Sumner, who was a great libertarian. The description “social Darwinist” was never made of his views during his lifetime.

[Who Owns the Sky? The Struggle to Control Airspace from the Wright Brothers On • By Stuart Banner • Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008 • 192 pages]

In my post The Origins of Libertarian IP Abolitionism, I discussed the origins of the modern libertarian anti-IP movement. I’ve learned a lot more about the antecedents and history of all this from teaching the Mises Academy course “Rethinking Intellectual Property: History, Theory, and Economics.” This history is very interesting.