In the comments on an earlier post, my good friend and former neighbor Stephen Haptonstahl took issue with my claim that NPR and PBS redistribute wealth upward. Scroll down a bit; he points out that “[t]he median NPR listener makes $86K.

The university where Murray Rothbard and Hans Hoppe once taught is facing what the Las Vegas Review Journal describes as bankruptcy. UNLV president Neal Smatresk “said he believes the state’s higher education system will have to declare financial exigency, a declaration similar to bankruptcy, to deal with the cuts.”

A financial exigency declaration would allow the university to fire tenured faculty and break other contracts.

“Our state is nearing a state of fiscal collapse,” Smatresk said.

One of the things I love about my job is the opportunity to talk to people who represent a wide range of disciplinary and ideological perspectives about ideas, even when it is only for a couple of minutes. Anarchy was a topic that came up today, and it is a subject that economists are exploring in fascinating detail. I’ve been revising my paper with Chris Coyne on the Memphis Riot of 1866, and it is convincing me that even the standard “externalities and public goods” rationales for the state are pretty weak.

Higher food prices set off the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt and the mass protests in countries like Algeria, Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain, and Iran. People in these countries buy more unprocessed foods and spend a much higher percentage of their income on food, so they have been severely impoverished by Bernanke’s QE2.

Inflation hawks were disappointed by the very early retirement of Kevin Warsh from the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors. In contrast, those who think Ben Bernanke needs more doves on the board in order to push through his inflationist medicine celebrated Warsh’s unexpected exit.

David Carr frets, “For those of us who make a living typing, it’s all very scary, of course. It’s less about the diminution of authority and expertise, although there is that, and more about the growing perception that content is a commodity, and one that can be had for the price of zero.”

I just listened to the most recent episode of Denise Howell’s This Week in Law. It featured anti-copyright activist and artist Nina Paley, and had a really excellent, fascinating and wide ranging extended discussion of artistic creativity, problems with copyright and the Creative Commons license model, and so on (I was a guest on last week’s show).