[From The Case for Legalizing Capitalism]

Having learned that the government acts in ways detrimental to its citizens economically, and by causing wars, we should ask exactly why we support our politicians, why we support most of our military operations, and why we support our very national identity. In short, we should ask ourselves why we are patriotic.

Here’s Suffolk University economist Benjamin Powell on farm subsidies and their effect on poor countries (like recently-decimated-by-flooding Pakistan. A question: is low volatility in food prices explained by protectionism and subsidies, or is it explained by prosperity? My hypothesis is that the US and Europe have stable food supplies and low price volatility because (a) we’re extremely wealthy and (b) we have extremely well-developed financial markets.

Mark J. Perry alerts us to a great quote from P.J. O’Rourke:

“The free market is not an ideology or a creed or something we’re supposed to take on faith, it’s a measurement. It’s a bathroom scale. I may hate what I see when I step on the bathroom scale, but I can’t pass a law saying I weigh 160 pounds. Authoritarian governments think they can pass that law—a law to change the measurement of things.”

Perry then compares this to a minimum wage law:

The current crisis has economists, from mainstream defenders of central banking, such as Alan Blinder, to the leading interpreter of Austrian business-cycle theory, Roger Garrison, calling for a reexamination of the role of central banks and money in the economy.

This was in my RSS feed: Stephen Budiansky does some of the math and finds that, giving how efficient it is to move things by truck and by rail, the energy costs associated with shipping lettuce from California to New York are trivial relative to the energy costs associated with storing that lettuce in a New York refrigerator (my apologies to whoever first linked it; I owe you a hat tip).

It is a testament to the power of government propaganda that several generations of self-described conservatives have held as their core belief that war and militarism are consistent with limited, constitutional government. These conservatives think they are “defending freedom” by supporting every military adventure that the state concocts. They are not.