The socialist dreamers of the Venus Project imagine a future society of incredible abundance. Robert Murphy explains that our world could become as wealthy as they say, but only through the defense of private property.

The NYT this morning runs a headline about dramatic progress against Alzheimer’s due to a sharing of findings. The story is breathless about how scientists and institutions have, astonishingly, put aside their copyrights and patents in order to make progress. And the hope is that this will be a model for the future.

From our forthcoming Turgot Collection:

The 26 essays collected in this book were published over the last three decades in a variety of academic journals, scholarly books, policy-report series, and periodicals aimed at the nonspecialist. Several were originally published in electronic periodicals. They share a common theme despite the fact that they were written at different times and for disparate audiences. This theme may be broadly summed up in the term “sound money” as defined by Ludwig von Mises. According to Mises,

I have been a skeptic of the Chinese growth miracle for some time. This excellent piece by Edward Chancellor, titled China’s Red Flags makes raises several objections to the bullish story.

Chancellor points out the similarities to the similar mania around Japan in the 80s when it was argued that their economic growth was due to their central planners’ ability to pick winners and direct investment into those sectors.

Different groups often notice different aspects of the same phenomenon — this is the point of the famous tale of the blind men encountering an elephant. When it comes to the Federal Reserve, Austrians usually focus on how its tinkering with interest rates leads to the boom–bust cycle.

Everyone who is serious about ideas now has to deal with the issue of “intellectual property,” especially given the advent of digital media and the state’s war on the supposed violators of the intellectual rights of others.