Deteriorating piano rolls can’t be preserved due to copyright law – an irony because the 1909 copyright act was passed precisely to keep piano rolls from driving live music from the market.

This health site dared defend smoking, pointing out that sugar is probably far more dangerous. Fascinating.

The post educated me about the anti-smoking hysteria of 1917.

I recently printed a small mountain of papers for my ongoing research projects about Walmart. One thing this illustrates is just how little we actually know about what we might claim to understand and be able to plan.

[This article is excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith. An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Jeff Riggenbach, is available for download.]

It is generally asserted that the history of modern industrialism and especially the history of the British “Industrial Revolution” provide an empirical verification of the “realistic” or “institutional” doctrine and utterly explode the “abstract” dogmatism of the economists.1

“I don’t think that’s very good for your blood pressure.” I was sitting on the couch feeding our newborn while my wife was bathing our two-year-old. I had flipped through the channels and had stopped on PBS, where someone was talking about how payday lenders were exploiting the poor. Liberalization: Age of Milton Friedman, also Peter Leeson’s paper. http://www.nber.org/papers/w16195.pdf

The press reports that the rich are not booking at the Four Seasons, not putting on the Ritz, and not filling their closets with furs and jewels from Saks. It gets worse.

Like a submarine patent, the intellectual-property issue has lurked beneath the surface of libertarianism for decades. IP was for a long time largely assumed by most libertarians to be legitimate, a type of property right. This is because of the influence of Ayn Rand, one of the most influential of all modern libertarians, who was strongly pro-IP.

See the google translation here.