As discussed in my last post, the ancient Greek poet Hesiod was granted his superior poetical powers in a miraculous encounter with the Muses. At least that is how Hesiod himself says it happened. We may not take his word for it, but we should be glad that he (or one of his successors), unlike most of his poetical contemporaries, took the trouble to learn how to write, and to write his poems down.

Michael Kinsley writes in The Atlantic that he’s worried about inflation.

Recently Steve Horwitz has adamantly defended Larry White’s interpretation of Mises’s attitude toward fiduciary media, an interpretation which I have criticized. Steve is surprisingly uncompromising and has even gone as far as to stake Mises’s reputation as a historian of economic thought and monetary theorist on the correctness of White’s interpretation. Writes Steve:

You want to see something truly inspiring? Have a look at the site of the Mises Institute, Sweden.

Going through an ancient box of my father’s books that had apparently been undisturbed since the 1970s, I came across Good Cheap Food from 1973: Note that it is an “anti-inflation cookbook.” I’m not sure how a cookbook becomes “anti-inflation,” but my guess is that this labeling comes from the 1970s practice of defining inflation as a general increase in prices. Being an Austrian, I prefer the alternative definition that stresses the importance of the money supply, but the marketing behind this book appears to be firmly entrenched with